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Rossana Hu co-founded Neri&Hu with Lyndon Neri, an interdisciplinary architecture firm based in Shanghai. The practice is known for its adaptive reuse projects. Hu was also recently appointed chair of the Department of Architecture at Penn State’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where he leads the Department of Architecture as department chair and tenured professor.
one spoke with the architect and educator about her new role and the individuals who influenced her career. The conversation also touched on topics related to architectural education, sustainability and industry diversity.
one: What are your goals and ambitions for your new position?
Relative humidity: I want to work on changing the architecture school experience and create a platform to redefine certain aspects of the discipline and profession. We should incorporate other disciplines into architecture curricula and integrate design with often isolated historical, theoretical, and technical studies, and expand academic scope to include the study of non-Western architectural structures. In this way, a deeper global awareness can be achieved.
The current educational experience for architects is fraught with overwork, mental and emotional trauma, and the negative connotations of dehumanizing design criticism. My own experience as a student in a design studio included professors tearing up drawings or stepping on models that students stayed up late to complete. This has been tolerated in our design education for a long time, and although things have improved a lot since my student days, we can do better. We need to create a culture of care that strives for excellence without losing heart and health.
one: Who inspires your work and leadership?why they Inspirational?
Relative humidity: Many professors who have taught me over the years. They include Donlyn Lyndon, Stanley Saitowitz, Christopher Alexander, and Laura Hartman at Berkeley, and Liz Diller, Enrique Mirallas, Beatrice Colomina, Mark Wigley, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves at Princeton University. However, it is Lin Huiyin, a legend of modern Chinese culture and China’s first female architect, whose work has a deeper personal significance.
She represents many things that I believe in, namely the importance of history in architecture. Her work is primarily about preservation, but she is concerned with the choice between keeping and deleting content—something we at Neri&Hu think about constantly in our work on adaptive reuse.
Lin Huiyin’s influence extends beyond architecture; she is a poet, writer, feminist, educator and cultural influencer. She did not have many architectural works, but her words shaped generations of Chinese intellectuals. Her image challenges both master architects and egoists. Her approach to construction is gentler, but no less powerful.
one: What are the most pressing topics in architectural education today?
Relative humidity:
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- Finding effective climate/ecological solutions through architecture
- The impact of advanced technology
- Health-centered studio culture and promote a culture of care
- The profession’s relevance and impact on society
one: How the COVID-19 pandemic has changed your perspective on being a leader in higher education Education, if any?
Relative humidity: This pandemic is just an inevitable outbreak, a long-term, global manifestation of our environmental, ecological, social, health system and other issues. For those of us working in higher education, for all of us, these are important facts that we cannot ignore.
one: How should sustainability themes be integrated into architectural education?
Relative humidity: It should be part of our required curriculum, not just on its own, but alongside everything we mean when we discuss design. Especially in design studios, sustainability issues should be integrated into all inquiries, and creative solutions that enable a more sustainable model should be recognized.
one: How will diversity and inclusion goals advance under your leadership?
Relative humidity: I think Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) initiatives have been most successfully addressed at the social level so far. But I would like to see the ethos of DEIB fundamentally upend our curriculum and really shake up our understanding of history, theory, culture, linguistics, representation… and other areas. DEIB means that one will study with classmates from all over the world, and it also means that one should feel a deep sense of belonging because cultural/racial/gender differences have design implications and these meanings are being taught in the classroom.
I hope that the discipline of architecture can be seen through different lenses and that what we learn in architecture school is diverse, equitable and inclusive.
one: As you create the future of architecture and architectural education, what are you optimistic about?
Relative humidity: Many people believe that we as architects are facing a crisis. The word “crisis” in Chinese consists of two characters, one of which is “machine”, which also appears in “opportunity”. We understand that we should strive to seize the opportunities of this crisis moment and re-examine how the creativity of architecture can be combined with artificial intelligence, robotics, and material science to find new relevance.
Design needs to work with advanced technologies to find new aesthetics and vocabulary for the future, but designers cannot forget our past. It’s exciting to think of the countless possibilities this could open up. We have not yet begun researching and reinventing a new architectural language to cope with the fast-paced technological revolution, but once we do, I believe we will see a new dawn.
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