STUDIO
NERI&HU DESIGN AND RESEARCH OFFICE
Dalian Cultural Center, Dalian, China. 2025
Studio Details
Location
Tokyo, Japan
Date
13 July-24 July, 2026
Team Leaders
Lyndon Neri (Founding Partner, Neri&Hu)
Rossana Hu (Founding Partner, Neri&Hu)
Christine Chang (Associate Director, Neri&Hu)
Program
Adaptive Reuse + Hotel
Field Trips and Site Visits
Sendagaya district
K5 Hotel
Soil Nihonbashi Hotel
Project
Nostalgia tends to be taken dismissively or negatively in both architecture and general culture, as Charles Maier aptly states: “Nostalgia is to longing as kitsch is to art.” We take on Svetlana Boym’s premise that nostalgia offers a productive means to engage with issues of collective memory, displacement and urban renewal, embracing the contradictions of modernity. We will explore how reflective nostalgia offers a new model for adaptive reuse in the context of Tokyo, wherein we will work in teams to adapt urban remnants and artifacts (city fabric, infrastructure, abandoned buildings, interior spaces, urban voids, etc). Our proposals will explore tectonics, materiality and methods and techniques of adaptive reuse, creating architectural interventions that focus on the dialogue between “old and new”. The architectural acts of stitching and incision—concepts borrowed from surgical precision—will serve as critical methodologies. Drawing from Gordon Matta-Clark’s transformative spatial practices, teams will employ incision as an act of critical subtraction, revealing latent relationships within the built fabric. Stitching, conversely, emphasizes reconciliation and integration, reassembling fragmented elements into cohesive wholes. Other strategies to be explored: Insertion, Extension, Inlay, Deletion, Carve, Grafting, Layering, Framing, Excavation, Infill, Assemblage.
We will study evolving dynamics of cultural tourism and rethink the hotel typology to address the rise of the nomadic workforce. Recent general depreciation of the yen currency against the dollar has made Japan an enticing destination for digital nomads. The concept of the hotel as we know it today evolved over centuries and is continuously shaped by contemporary cultural/socio-economic forces. Recent platforms and trends such as Airbnb and co-living have disrupted the hotel industry, forcing us to question what new forms the “hotel” can take on in the future, how it can interface with the local community and their role in the promotion of cultural tourism. While many contemporary hotels operate as self-contained objects detached from their surroundings, early forms of hospitality architecture were embedded within community life. Historically, these spaces functioned as social and civic infrastructures—ranging from Roman thermal baths and Japanese ryokans to hospices, monasteries, and inns—providing refuge for travelers while facilitating exchange and collective life. The hotel typology represents a convergence of public and private realms, with the notion of simultaneously being “at home” and “away” is at its core.
Founded in 2006 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai. The practice’s burgeoning global portfolio includes commissions ranging from master planning and architecture, to interior design, installation, furniture, product, branding and graphic works. Currently working on projects in many countries, Neri&Hu is composed of multi-cultural staff who speak over 30 different languages. The diversity of the team reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new paradigm in architecture.
Neri&Hu’s location is purposeful. With Shanghai considered a new global frontier, Neri&Hu is in the immediate center of this contemporary chaos. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for design inquiries that span across a wide spectrum of scales. Furthermore, Neri&Hu has expanded the conventional boundaries of practice to include complementary disciplines. A critical probing into the specificities of program, site, function, and history is essential to the creation of rigorous work. Based on research, Neri&Hu anchors its ethos on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form, and light rather than conforming to a formulaic style.
Internships and Opportunities
Young designers and students accepted to join Neri&Hu at Venice Studio may be considered for available internship or job opportunities at Neri&Hu. Selection of candidates is at the sole discretion of the team leaders and Neri&Hu. Places are not guaranteed.