Archinect - News

Neri&Hu complete new Shanghai Performing Arts Center, challenging traditional entertainment venue design

2024-09-25T18:43:00-04:00

Neri&Hu has designed a new performing arts space for Shanghai with 2,500 seats and a multipurpose space they feel will challenge ostentatious tropes latent in 21st-century iterations of the typology.

Located in Shanghai’s busy Qiantan commercial area, the New Bund 31 Performing Arts Center shines as a cultural beacon amidst a forest of tall buildings. Neri&Hu chose to conceptualize its interior as an 'arena' in the Classical sense, arranging a stacked layer of arches to frame the venue’s performance space and five-story atrium.

Photo by Pedro Pegenaute

The arches are repeated on the outside in bronze-toned cassettes lining the ground-level facade. Back inside, bronze is used again in the bathroom fixtures. Copper finishes line the elevators to floating balconied seating boxes, and the the VIP lounge made out of perforated bricks.

Photo by Pedro Pegenaute

Set against this is the design of a smaller black box exhibition space component that services the theater's MICE (meetings, incen...

Neri&Hu's newest Blue Bottle Shanghai space shelters a community of coffee drinkers from the daily grind

2024-07-18T18:25:00-04:00

A thought-provoking new café design in Shanghai’s mixed-use Columbia Circle complex from Neri&Hu for the Blue Bottle Coffee chain has caught our eye after being completed earlier this year.

Executed at just 1,680 square feet within the leftover footprint evacuated by a former residential building, the new 'The Imprint' café provides customers a respite from the blistering pace of city life with a welcoming sense of 'home' in line with the client's brand identity and community values.

Photo by Zhu Runzi

“Even if the building is no longer visible in the physical world, the traces it leaves in our individual or collective memories serve as a source of nostalgia and remembering,” the firm states in their project description.

Photo by Zhu Runzi

Within its white suspended massing, the impression of a corrugated roof's mold is used to manifest a sentimental attachment to the space in dialogue with the remaining composition of recycled clay bricks and plaster.

Photo by Zhu Runzi

"Despite the...

Neri&Hu completes Hainan Island wellness retreat inspired by ancient Chinese cities

2023-10-25T11:51:00-04:00

Neri&Hu has completed a wellness hotel on China’s Hainan Island. Named the Sanya Wellness Retreat, the scheme draws inspiration from the ancient Chinese walled city, which was typically elevated on a heavy plinth and surrounded by water. The resulting hotel is defined by two parts: a wooden dwelling comprising guest rooms and a masonry base beneath containing all public spaces.

Image credit: Chen Hao

The L-shaped building forms a water courtyard at the intersection of the two wings, serving a central feature from which all the hotel’s public amenities spread outwards. Meanwhile, the lobby forms a “garden landscape with a floating lantern hovering above that allows a gentle light to filter in,” while ceilings are lowered to frame views towards the sea.

Image credit: Chen Hao

“At every given opportunity, the design tries to embody the genius loci of Hainan, to blend elements from the island’s collective memory, culture, and natural features,” ...

Shma's rippling landscape adds to Neri&Hu-designed hotel in Zhengzhou

2023-08-21T15:21:00-04:00

Bangkok-based landscape architecture firm Shma Company Limited has introduced an elegant, small-scale landscape intervention in front of a Neri&Hu-designed hotel called Le Meridien in Zhengzhou City, China.

Image: Arch-exist

The renovation project comprises approximately 65,000 square feet of space in a densely populated area. The architects were tasked to create a hotel frontage landscape that improves the site’s overall appearance, in addition to enhancing ground parking and vehicular movement.

Image: Arch-exist

The project design pays tribute to Zhengzhou’s historical textile weaving industry through its sculptural landscape weaves and folds. A series of undulating lawn stripes represent silk being woven. The landscape and the existing building seamlessly integrate with each other. A water feature situated in front of the hotel’s lobby drop-off area serves as the main welcoming element.

Image: Arch-exist

Two colors, bronze and black, were used for the finishing of the stainless st...

University of Pennsylvania appoints Rossana Hu as Architecture Chair

2023-04-12T17:13:00-04:00

The University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design has announced its appointment of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office co-founder Rossana Hu as the next chair of its Department of Architecture.

Hu, who is currently on the faculty of the College of Architecture & Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai, will take over chair duties effective January 1st of next year. Current associate professor and MArch program director Andrew Saunders will lead in an interim role beginning in the fall.

Hu will become the third woman to serve as the department’s chair and continues a relationship with China that has been long-established at the school since the beginning of the 1920s.

“We see ourselves as mediators: between past and present, individual and collective, public and private, rural and urban,” Hu said of her firm’s approach to design, before adding, “It’s clear that the faculty and students at Penn are equally committed to this vision.”

Related on Archinect: The Wei...

Neri&Hu designs Blue Bottle Zhang Yuan Cafe within revitalized 19th-century residence in Shanghai

2022-12-27T15:25:00-05:00

Shanghai-based firm Neri&Hu has completed a café within a historic, 19th-century public garden noted for its Shikumen typology residences. Named Zhang Yuan, the site has recently reopened after a complete rehabilitation of its historic buildings.

As part of the revamp, coffee roaster and retailer Blue Bottle Coffee Company commissioned Neri&Hu to create a retail space in one of the old residences. With this project, the firm aimed to channel the Shanghainese balance between urban activity and leisure.

Image: Zhu Runzi

In accordance with historic preservation guidelines, the existing brick walls, doors, and windows of the original architectural façades and atriums were preserved. The café rises in the midst of these elements. Along the exterior wall of the old building, an elongated, alley-like space connects the main street to the atriums. Here, benches and small tables are lined against the windows and walls.

Image: Zhu Runzi

Neri&Hu worked to make the new structure as light as pos...