Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.
Occupation: We are the founders of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an interdisciplinary practice based in Shanghai.
Instagram: @neriandhu
Home Town: Ozamiz and Kaohsiung
Studio Location: Shanghai, China with a satellite office in Milan.
Describe what you make: Our growing global portfolio includes master planning, architecture, interior design, installations, furniture, product design, branding, and graphic works. We are currently working on projects in many countries; our team is multicultural. This diversity reinforces our core vision: to embrace a global worldview where overlapping design disciplines come together to form a new paradigm for architecture.
The most important thing you’ve designed to date: It’s hard to pin one project as the most important. We would argue perhaps our first architectural project allowed us to define who we are as a practice and this was the Waterhouse, located on the Bund in Shanghai. For the Waterhouse, it was very important for us that the design of the hotel take cue from the neighborhoods of Shanghai, but not in a touristic way. We wanted the guests of the hotel to experience an abstracted, or interpreted, version of Shanghai, so we embedded in the design many features of the city in an unexpected and sometimes uncanny way.
There is a strong spatial experience inspired by the traditional long-tang (lanes) of Shanghai, where there is a blurring of interior/exterior spaces, private/public spaces, where one can see from one’s guestroom windows directly into the hotel lobby or the restaurant. Also spread across different surfaces of the hotel are graphic installations of quotes regarding traveling from past Shanghainese literati and local phrases about food, clothing, and everyday practices well known to locals but not quite understandable to non-locals. The architectural form and material of the new rooftop addition echo that of ships passing by the Huangpu River in front of the hotel.
