Acclaimed architects and scholars Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri welcomed as 2023 Friedman Visiting Professors
Alongside their design practice, Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are deeply committed to architectural education and have lectured around the world at various universities and professional forums.
Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri join the Department of Architecture this spring as Friedman Visiting Professors of Practice. Hu and Neri are founding partners of the acclaimed Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an interdisciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for their design inquiries, which span multiple design disciplines and a wide spectrum of scales. Employing design research as a critical tool to probe the specificities of each project, Neri&Hu engages architecture with an ethos based on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form and light.
Alongside their design practice, Neri and Hu are deeply committed to architectural education and have lectured around the world at various universities and professional forums. They recently taught as Eero Saarinen Visiting Professors at the Yale School of Architecture, where they received the distinguished Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair; as design critics in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; and at the University of Hong Kong Graduate School of Architecture. Hu is currently chair of the department of architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai, the first woman to hold the position.
Neri and Hu are also founding partners of Design Republic, a design platform incorporating retail concept, design and cultural exhibitions, and education founded in Shanghai in 2004. In 2015, they were appointed creative directors of Stellar Works. Aside from architecture and interiors, Neri and Hu create industrial design products for various brands in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Their eponymous product line neri&hu has received Perspective Awards, the Red Dot Award, and I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review Awards.
Hu received her master’s of architecture and urban planning at Princeton University and her bachelor’s of arts in architecture at UC Berkeley, with a minor in music. Neri received a bachelor’s of arts in architecture from UC Berkeley and a master’s of architecture from Harvard University.
Neri&Hu and its designs have been recognized by a number of prestigious international awards spanning the fields of architecture, interior, product, and graphic design: the Brick Award Building Outside the Box (2022); Dezeen Awards Architecture Studio of the Year (2021); Frame Lifetime Achievement Award (2021); Architizer A+Firm Awards Best Firm (2021); Madrid Design Festival Awards (2020); Design for Asia Grand Award (2020); Blueprint Overall Award for Design (2019); and The Plan Award Overall Winner (2018), among many others.
thresholds: space, time and practice, the firm’s second monograph, was recently published by Thames & Hudson.
Above: Photo by Jiaxi Yang & Zhu Zhe