Li Hu and Huang Wenjing

The Department of Architecture welcomes Li Hu and Huang Wenjing for their lecture, "OPEN as both verb and adjective in Architecture." Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, Founding Partners of OPEN Architecture and Friedman Visiting Professors of Practice at UC Berkeley, revisit two decades of practice through the dual meaning of the word “open”. As a verb, open becomes a spatial operation—cutting, separating, and permeating built mass to enable new relationships between architecture, landscape, and civic life. As an adjective, it suggests a connected and sustainable way of being: an ethical and relational engagement with the world. Drawing on OPEN’s projects across cultural, educational, and experimental typologies, the lecture explores architecture as a situated practice within a dynamic and interconnected Earth system, informed by both contemporary Gaia theory and Daoist philosophy.

LI Hu (Hon. FAIA) + HUANG Wenjing (AIA) are founding partners of OPEN Architecture, Howard A. Friedman Visiting Professors in the Practice of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kenzo Tange Design Critics in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

LI and HUANG co-founded OPEN in New York City and subsequently established their office in Beijing in 2008. Prior to OPEN, LI Hu was a partner at Steven Holl Architects, and the director of Columbia University GSAPP’s Studio-X Beijing. He received his B. Arch. from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1996, and his M. Arch. from Rice University in 1998. HUANG was an associate at the New York-based firm Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. She received her B. Arch. from Tsinghua University in 1996, and her M. Arch. from Princeton University in 1999.

Some major projects by OPEN include Sun Tower, Shanfeng Academy, Chapel of Sound, UCCA Dune Art Museum, Tank Shanghai, and Garden School/Beijing No.4 High School Fangshan Campus. The publications co-authored by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing and on their works include Reinventing Cultural Architecture: A Radical Vision by OPEN (2022), OPEN Questions (2018), Towards Openness (2018), and OPEN Reaction (2015).

Recent awards received by OPEN include the AIA International Design Awards Honor Award (US), Arcasia Awards Gold Award, and Design for Asia Awards. OPEN’s work has been collected by Museum of Modern Art in New York and M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and widely published and frequently exhibited around the world.

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