6 Projects That Point Toward the Future of Architecture

China’s contemporary architecture scene is often described as a playground, and the term especially applies to cultural facilities. After a 1980s-era infrastructure redevelopment initiative rebuilt many Chinese cities from scratch, the national program expanded its focus to opera houses, museums, and libraries largely designed by Americans and Europeans. While the resulting visual spectacles have garnered clicks worldwide, they don’t necessarily resonate with their local communities. In 2019 Forbes revealed that hundreds of new Chinese museums contained no artwork whatsoever.

The new Rizzoli monograph Reinventing Cultural Architecture: A Radical Vision by OPEN represents a heartening parallel thread in the Chinese architecture scene. OPEN is the studio of Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, partners in work and in life who opened their Beijing-based practice in 2008—a little more than a decade after Chinese architects were even permitted to work outside government design institutes. The policy shift unleashed homegrown talents who weave landscape, regional character, and respect for historic fabric into a modern vocabulary, and, as Reinventing Cultural Architecture reveals, OPEN’s principals are role models for this promising generation.

Written by Catherine Shaw with a foreword by Aric Chen, the book captures OPEN’s approach to the built environment in six commissions. The buildings hold their own against Western-made cultural buildings in terms of iconic aesthetics, but the architects are also incomparably dedicated to maximizing public usage, even if that means tearing up a client’s design brief or trampling outdated attitudes. Now that the Chinese government has outlawed copycat architecture, these works point the way to a diverse, place-based approach to building in China. Preview OPEN’s newly published works below.