Event
OPEN’s founding partners, LI Hu and HUANG Wenjing, were invited to deliver three lectures across both the East and West Coasts of the United States in March and April 2026 by the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley; the American Institute of Architects San Francisco; and the Weitzman School of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
The lecture delivered at the two universities was titled “OPEN as Both Verb and Adjective in Architecture,” as a theoretical revisit of the office’s evolving design practice and philosophy to this day. On the other hand, “OPEN: A Spatial Language and a Way of Being” was delivered at the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, which embraced the same agenda with a more practice-focused tone.
Li Hu and Huang Wenjing revisited two decades of practice through the dual meaning of the word “open”. As a verb, open becomes a spatial operation—cutting, separating, and permeating built mass to enable new relationships between architecture, landscape, and civic life. As an adjective, it suggests a connected and sustainable way of being: an ethical and relational engagement with the world. Drawing on OPEN’s projects across cultural, educational, and experimental typologies, the lectures explored architecture as a situated practice within a dynamic and interconnected Earth system, informed by both contemporary Gaia theory and Daoist philosophy.
