ArchDaily Interviews: The Latest Architecture and News

During the latest Design Indaba Festival, we have the chance to interview Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, from Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, a Shanghai-based inter-disciplinary architectural design practice, about their work and way of thinking about architecture.

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In order to inspire our audience, generate critical debates, and develop ideas, ArchDaily has been continuously questioning architects about the future of architecture. To define emerging trends that will shape the upcoming cities, examining “What will be the future of architecture?” became an essential inquiry. More relevant during these ever-changing moments, discover 10 interviews from ArchDaily’s archived YouTube playlists that will highlight diverse visions from 10 different pioneers of the architecture field.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped how we work together. From telecommuting to virtual programming, architects and designers are rethinking traditional office structures to reimagine collaboration around the world. For architect Evelyn Lee, her work as the first Senior Experience Designer at Slack Technologies centers on building better workplace experiences. In a year defined by remote work, she's exploring what culture and community mean today.

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Ralph Johnson (b. 1948) is a global design director at Chicago-based Perkins and Will. The architect joined the company in 1977 and has been heading its design ideology since 1985. Johnson is the architect behind the firm’s most iconic buildings, including Rush University Transformation Project (2012), O’Hare International Airport (1993), and Boeing International Headquarters (1990) – all in Chicago, the United States Coast Guard Headquarters (2015) in Washington DC, Tinkham Veale University Center at the Case Western Reserve University (2015) in Cleveland, and Shanghai Natural History Museum (2015). The architect’s monographs have been published regularly since mid-1990s under his own name. He has been a visiting critic at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois, his alma mater, from which he received his Bachelor of Architecture in 1971. He acquired his Master of Architecture from Harvard’s GSD in 1973.

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Jiakun Liu was born in 1956 in Chengdu, China. Architecture was not his first choice to pursue at school, as he originally wanted to be an artist. He heard that architecture had something to do with drawing, so he applied to Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering, not fully understanding what his role as an architect would be. After his graduation in 1982, Liu worked at the Chengdu Architectural Design Academy for two years, the experience he did not enjoy. So, he set out on a self-searching journey that lasted for over a decade, spending time in Tibet and Xinjiang in West China where he practiced meditation, painting, and writing, producing several works of fiction, while officially working at the Literature Academy as a writer. 

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“The center of architecture is shifting and cannot hold,” writes guest editor Bryony Roberts in Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice. This moment of change, in which issues of inequity and intersectionality are coming to the fore, represents “an invitation to think differently, a chance to reask the questions that haunted the 20th century.” To that end, Roberts conducted a series of interviews with experimental architects exploring new forms of practice, including this conversation with Mabel O. Wilson.

Mabel O. Wilson is a scholar and designer who has become a leading voice in discussions on space, politics, and memory in black America. She is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, as well as a professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies and the associate director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Her books include Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums. Her interdisciplinary practice Studio & is part of the architectural team that designed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is also a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA), a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide. We talked at an outdoor cafe near Columbia on one of the last warm days in fall 2019.

We visited Clément Blanchet in his Paris studio, located in Villa Seurat, a small Parisian street flanked by modernist buildings. Inside a beautiful loft by Maillard et Ducamp, the team of Clément Blanchet Architecture was working hard on a master plan in China.

After going through diverse education programs, that included the AA in London, the Chulalongkorn Mahawitthayalai Architectural School in Bangkok, and the University of Illinois in Chicago, Clément started his career at OMA, “a long therapy [...] to discover who I was”. During his career at OMA, he became the director of OMA France, participating in projects such as the Caen Library, the Parc des Expositions in Toulouse, the Lab City CentraleSupélec, among others.

The practice is structured as a laboratory, researching, informing and generating architecture and urbanism in all its forms and sizes. From a series of carefully designed interiors for restaurants, playing with a diverse palette of materials, to large scale multifunctional buildings and master plans, adapting to the fast-changing needs of society. 

Founded in 2006, by three partners – Dimitri Shapakidze, Irakli Abashidze, and Otar Nemsadze in Tbilisi, Georgia, Laboratory of Architecture #3 is known for such enigmatic projects as the Grove Design Hotel (2017), Mediatheque (2017), both in Tbilisi, and Visitor Center for Architectural Miniatures Park (2016) in Shekvetili, Georgia. Nemsadze left the partnership in 2011, to pursue his studies in the Netherlands to advance his independent career. In 2018, he co-founded Tbilisi Architecture Biannual and is currently undertaking his PhD at Tbilisi State University. The practice attracted attention from the very beginning. The partners’ first project was a private villa for a local entrepreneur and their hotel on Leselidze Street in Tbilisi was a result of a competition that they won in their inaugural year. After just six years since its inception, Laboratory of Architecture #3 was named the 2012 Best Architect of the year in Georgia. The current two partners, Shapakidze (b. 1983, Tbilisi) and Abashidze (b. 1984, Tbilisi) know each other since their childhood. They were neighbors and then studied at the Georgian Technical University in Tbilisi one year apart. They both worked for local architects while studying at the university and started their office right after graduation. The following interview with Dimitri Shapakidze took place over lunch at the Grove Design Hotel.

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Architect Li Hua was born in 1972 in China. He studied architecture at China’s leading school, Tsinghua University, from which he received his bachelor’s (1994) and master’s (1997) degrees. He continued his studies at Yale University, graduating with his second Master of Architecture in 1999. Hua then stayed in the US, practicing in New York at Herbert Beckhard Frank Richlan & Associates. The firm’s founders used to be partners at Marcel Breuer office before starting their own practice in the early 1980s. This experience introduced Hua to dealing with masonry and precast concrete, while working on cultural and educational projects in the New York area. Returning to Beijing in 2003, Hua established Universal Architecture Studio (UAS) with his former classmate at Tsinghua. Parallel to that, he started his teaching career – first at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, CAFA and then at his Alma Mater. In 2009, Hua left the partnership and established his own practice, Trace Architecture Office, TAO. His studio currently numbers about twenty architects. TAO’s most prominent built projects include Huandao Middle School in Hainan province (2018), Xinzhai Coffee Manor in Yunnan (2018), Wuyishan Bamboo Raft Factory in Fujian (2013), and Museum of Handcraft Paper in Yunnan (2010). The architect won many prestigious honors and was shortlisted for the 2013 Aga Kahn Award. The following interview was conducted at the architect’s office in Caochangdi Village, a thriving arts and culture hub on the outskirts of Beijing.

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Liam Young was once described by the BBC as "the man designing our futures". The Australian-born architect and director has carved a vibrant path through architectural discourse, standing at the intersection of design, technology, and media. A self-described "speculative architect", Young is the co-founder of thinktank Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, using vivid imagery and films to spark conversations about the future of the built environment, and the relationships between humans and machines, bits and atoms, artificial and natural. He also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels the world in search of landscapes that speak to his focus on global flows of materials, technologies, and ideas.

Since their founding in Bangkok in 2013, Space Popular have offered an eclectic series of architectural spaces, objects, and events that cross digital and physical space, speculating on how the two realms could blend together in the near future. Directed by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, both graduates of the Architectural Association in London, Space Popular has completed buildings, exhibitions, artworks, furniture collections, and interiors across Asia and Europe, as well as engaging works of virtual architecture.

In the middle of February, we were invited to visit Ljubljana and attend the Matchmaking Conference organized by Future Architecture Platform -- an organization, coordinated by Ljubljana's Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), that provides young talents with the opportunity to share their ideas -- practical or conceptual -- and meet fellow emerging architects. The three-day event gathered 25 teams from all over the world to present their projects and discuss potential collaborations.

We always appreciate the people behind great initiatives in architecture, and try to never miss the chance to share their profiles and thoughts with our readers. Future Architecture Platform is no exception -- the Leader of the great team of architects, curators, publishers, and educators, Director of MAO and architecture critic, Matevž Čelik told us about the ideas driving the Platform, challenges that emerging architects face these days, and the future of architectural education and profession.

John Ronan (b. 1963, Grand Rapids, Michigan) is known for his sensual atmospheric buildings that tend to unfold layer by layer their spatial complexity, as one moves through them. His focus is on the use of materiality in ways that reinvent architecture. Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1991) and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan (1985). He has been teaching architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1992. John Ronan Architects was established in Chicago in 1999, the year Ronan won the Townhouse Revisited Competition sponsored by the Graham Foundation. In 2006, the firm was featured in the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the Young Chicago exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007, the architect was selected to build the prestigious Poetry Foundation in Chicago, out of a pool of 50 international contenders. His monograph Explorations: The Architecture of John Ronan was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. In 2016, the firm was named one of seven international finalists for the Obama Presidential Library. The following interview is a condensed version of our conversation at the architect’s studio in Chicago.

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