Founded in 2003 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri & Hu Design and Research Office (NHDRO) is an interdisciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. NHDRO works internationally providing architecture, interior, master planning, graphic, and industrial design services. Currently working on projects in seven countries, NHDRO is composed of multi-cultural staffs with a capacity to speak over 20 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.
NHDRO’s location is purposeful; with Shanghai considered a new global frontier, NHDRO is in the center of this contemporary chaos. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for the architectural explorations involved in every project. Because new sets of contemporary problems relating to buildings now extend beyond traditional architecture, the practice challenges traditional boundaries of architecture to include other complementary disciplines.
NHDRO believes strongly in research as a design tool. As each project bears its unique set of contextual issues, a critical probing into the specificities of program, site, function, and history is essential to the creation of rigorous architecture. Based on research, NHDRO desires to anchor its architecture on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form, and light rather than conforming to a formulaic style. The ultimate significance behind each project comes from how the built forms create meaning through their physical representations.
