Q&A: Rossana Hu, Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture

How has your thinking about adaptive reuse evolved over the years?

That question really points to the heart of our practice, both how we started, and where we want to take the practice. Our first adaptive reuse project really came out of not even knowing much about the topic. It's a term that is becoming really fashionable, but often, before a term is widely used, people are already doing the work. For us, that's definitely the case. We started with The Waterhouse at South Bund [completed May 2010]. It was a very bold decision on our part because the site was supposed to be demolished—that was the original mandate from the client. They wanted a brand-new, talked-about building, and in their mind, that meant starting from scratch.

When we went to the site, we had a purely intuitive response to the state of the place, the neighborhood, and, also, our feelings about working in Shanghai. At the time, the city was undergoing rapid development. Our experience living there was that there would be a block where you used to get your ice cream every afternoon, and one day you would go and it would be gone. I'm not talking about a storefront—an entire city block would just disappear overnight. That experience was really very shocking.

When we saw the site of Waterhouse, we intuitively felt that it had the kind of urban, collective, communal history that should be valued. The client didn’t think it had value and they wanted to demolish it. The city didn’t think it had value because it was not historic. So much around the country was being torn down—could we save something? It was very naïve of us, but from that project, many other projects came about where we were able to develop different ways of thinking about reusing things that were being torn down.

A lot of our design work focuses on resolving things by using common sense. Doing something as simple as buying a chair that can be used for a hundred years: That is a form of sustainability. With a building, if you don't tear it down, and you use the structure and the walls, there's a huge reduction in carbon footprint. Nobody needs to go to school to learn this, it's just common sense that you don't throw things away.

We're hoping that with some of our projects, we can show that adaptive reuse can be just as interesting as building new. Clients want to create places where lots of people will congregate because there's commercial value in this. But we're saying that with a project that uses the concepts of adaptive reuse, you can attract even more people because there's meaning behind the design.

Can you talk about other projects that show how your firm’s approach to adaptive reuse has evolved?

In the vein of adaptive reuse, different projects have adapted different things and used different design strategies. For example, The Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat project [completed October 2017] used a site that was a ruin, and focused on reusing and reclaiming materials. The project is made almost entirely out of reclaimed bricks. So, it looks like it's been there forever, but in fact, it's a brand-new project. Only when you go to the interior do you see what is new.

A second project, the Nantou City Guesthouse [completed December 2021], involved the reuse of a very unsightly apartment building by keeping the existing facade, which is made of pink tile and makes the elevation look like a bathroom. By keeping the bulk of the building, the client was not spending money on a new foundation and a new façade, which we covered with a veil-like structure. The project focuses on bringing the public up through the interior of the existing building by a staircase up to the rooftop, which we saw as a contribution to civic life.

What advice do you have for your students if their goal is to open a firm of their own one day?

First, I would say, don't take the ways that people have practiced as architects as a strict guide for how you should work in the future, because the world is changing so quickly. Work is changing because of AI, and frankly, we don't know where that’s going. I feel that truly open-minded people, who also have a good design sensibility, will succeed because they will find new ways of doing what they do well.

You were educated in the United States, after your family immigrated from China, and you've taught at universities in both countries. What do you see as the challenges and opportunities of studying architecture in another country as many Weitzman students do?

I started teaching in the US about seven years ago and was a surprised by how the makeup of the student bodies of schools here, in terms of nationality and ethnicity, has changed so much since I was in school. I asked myself: Why are foreign students, especially from Asia, coming here? And what can we give them that their home countries’ educational systems cannot? At the same time, I asked: What can the students from the US learn from students coming from a foreign country? The combination makes us much more diverse, and that diversity changes our perception about the world.

It used to be that Americans didn’t travel abroad as much as people from some other parts of the world. I think this was because America is such a powerful country, and so big geographically, that Americans felt they didn't really have to go abroad. I grew up with friends who've never even gotten a passport because they have never had to leave the country. In an architecture program like this one, we have studios and seminars where we have deep discussions with people from different parts of the world. I think this is very valuable for American students who are going to school with foreign students, and vice versa.

In China, there's a lot of discussion around why people come to America for an education. One thing that comes up repeatedly is the strength of the American educational system, particularly at the graduate and postgraduate level. It is true that the education system in the States is one of the best in the world, and that is why some of the best students choose to come here. A great education is offered here with a different way to look at the world. Even if it's only one year—or three years—that they are here, this part of their education is going to be the anchor of everything they do for the rest of their lives.

Look at Lin Huiyin [Chinese architect, poet, artist, and preservationist (1904 – 1955)], who we're about to celebrate in our commencement ceremony: She, along with the generation of architects she was a part of, came to Penn to study architecture and then went on to found modern architecture in China. I am hoping there will be other people who come to the US, hopefully Penn, and go back to their home countries and set up the foundation for a new type of architecture.

What will you teach next year?

I think it will be a studio—I usually teach studios—most likely focusing on adaptive reuse. Over the past three or four years, our practice has become very interested in focusing on ethnic enclaves and projects that deal with multi-ethnicity and inner-city issues. We've been working with Chinatowns in San Francisco as well as Milan. We're also looking at the Chinatown in Paris. The establishment of ethnic enclaves in America, and how they have shaped American cities, is a fascinating subject for both me and my partner Lyndon [Neri]. We have used Chinatowns as a site for many studio projects when we have taught in the US. I find Philadelphia’s Chinatown very interesting: It's gone through many different transformations, and there are debates right now about plans for a new arena. I think it could be really interesting to use that as a studio site.

You minored in music as an undergraduate student, and you are connected to the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in an advisory capacity. Are you still a musician?

Well, I'm a music lover. I play the piano and a little bit of cello. In the past, when I have gone to concerts of young pianists, I've been able to identify that they are going to be a huge star one day. And now some of them are really well-known international talents. One of the things that really attracted me to Philadelphia is the Curtis Institute of Music. Curtis is the best music school in the world and now I live three blocks away. I haven't been able to go to any of their student recitals yet because I haven't had the time, but I want to. Philadelphia is a great music city.