Dong Gong is the founder of Beijing-based Vector architects, known for its poetic way with materials. One of his celebrated works is the Yangshuo Sugar House Hotel – a derelict 1960s sugarcane mill turned into an artful composition of perforated concrete blocks and bamboo canopies. In 2017, his Captain’s House in Fujian province received the 2021 RIBA International Awards for Excellence.
Born in 1972, Dong studied architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing before furthering his studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Following work stints for acclaimed architects like Richard Meier and Steven Holl, known for their mastery over form, shape and light, he returned to China as part of a generation of architects armed with both eastern and western learning.
“The most powerful architecture is not about itself, but what you can see through it or what you can observe. What does space allow you to see? What can space connect you to?” Dong has commented in an interview with digital magazine Stirworld. “The meaning of architecture should not describe by scholars or architects, but it should be felt by people. Space has the power to connect people.”
Xu Tiantian
Born in 1975 in Fujian, China, Xu Tiantian is the founding principal of DnA Design and Architecture. Her work is deeply concerned with the depopulation and desolation of China’s countryside as the working demographic left for urban centres during China’s 1980s Reform and Opening.
Her approach of “Architectural Acupuncture” focuses on the sensitive, sustainable revival of rural communities by working with existing local agricultural production and architectural heritage rather than against them. In 2020, she was accepted as an Honorary Fellow of American Institute of Architects in 2020.
The firm’s accolades include the WA China Architecture Award (2004), the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architect (2019), the 14th International Prize for Sustainable Architecture, Gold Medal (2019) and the Gold Prize of Holcim Awards 2023 for Asia-Pacific for the adaptive reuse of the Fujian Tulou heritage buildings. In 2022, it also received the Swiss Architectural Award for the reuse of the Shimen Bridge over the Songyin River, the Tofu Factor in Caizhai Village and the reuse of the Jinyun Quarries. The latter is a project that revived nine (out of over 3,000) small abandoned mountainside quarries into cultural and social installations.
Yung Ho Chang
Yung Ho Chang was born in Beijing. His father was prominent Chinese architect Zhang Kaiji. Educated in Nanjing Institute of Technology, and then Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, Chang was an educator in America before returning to Beijing to open Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) in 1993 with his wife, Lijia Lu.
It is the country’s first independent architecture firm, earning him the credit as the father of contemporary Chinese architecture. In 1999, Chang founded the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University. Awards garnered include first place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition, the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a jury member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize from 2011 to 2017.
In the Jiading Mini-Block project in Shanghai, he addressed the loss of human scale to Chinese cities after contemporary cities replaced traditional urban neighbourhoods. Chang also designed the Split House for landmark project, The Commune by the Great Wall. Completed in 2002, and comprising 11 villas and a clubhouse designed by a dozen Asian architects, it was lauded as China’s first collection of truly progressive contemporary architecture.
