Yichun Liu

The Department of Architecture welcomes Yichun Liu for his lecture, "Re-Cultivating Industrial Sites: The Structured Shapes of Time." 

This lecture explores how architectural practice can engage with time through the reuse and reinterpretation of industrial sites. It presents a series of projects as case studies, including four along the Huangpu River in Shanghai—the Long Museum West Bund, the Modern Art Museum at Laobaidu Wharf, the 80,000-ton Silo Art Center, and Riverside Passage—as well as the transformation of the water intake facility on Jianhu Lake in Shaoxing, the Laoyu Pavilion on Dianchi Wetland in Kunming, and the Upper Cloister in Jinshanling.

These works reflect Atelier Deshaus’s broader interest in productive sites—places shaped by labor, habitation, and traces of human presence. In these projects, spatial form and structural expression carry not only the memory of the past but also generate new modes of public life, particularly through a dialectical process between construction and nature.

Rather than erasing historical traces or rigidly adhering to the norms of conservation and restoration, these interventions aim to cultivate a material continuity and atmospheric resonance—embracing the aging of time, the transformation of space, the specific character of place, and a gentle reverence for nature.

In this context, architecture becomes a form of temporal reweaving—where structure, emotion, and landscape converge to shape what may be called the structured shapes of time.

Yichun Liu is the Co-Founder and Principal Architect of Atelier Deshaus, and currently serves as the 2025 Kenzo Tange Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is also a Visiting Professor at Tongji University and Southeast University, and serves on the editorial boards of The Architect and Architectural Journal. His architectural practice is grounded in a deep engagement with site, structure, and time, often transforming industrial remnants into spaces of contemporary public life. His design also explores contemporary reinterpretations of tradition, conveying poetic atmospheres through a structurescape approach.

Liu’s work has been featured in over 15 countries, including major international exhibitions such as Alors, La Chine? at the Centre Pompidou (2003), Eastern Promises at the MAK Museum (2013), and Reuse, Renew, Recycle at MoMA (2022). His Long Museum West Bund has received widespread acclaim, winning the Architectural Review Award for Emerging Architecture (2014), the AIA China Chapter Honor Award for Best in Show (2019), and the ARCASIA Gold Medal for Architecture (2020). His Modern Art Museum of Shanghai received the RIBA International Award for Excellence in 2021. In 2023, Liu was honored with the Architecture China Award for Practice.

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