Draft:HUANG Wenjing

Architecture Career
HUANG Wenjing, AIA, founding partner of OPEN, Kenzo Tange Design Critic in Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. HUANG received her B. Arch. from Tsinghua University in 1996, and her M. Arch. from Princeton University in 1999. She is a licensed architect in New York State and a member of the AIA.

HUANG Wenjing and LI Hu co-founded OPEN in New York City in 2003 and established the studio’s Beijing office in 2008. Prior to OPEN, HUANG was a senior designer and associate at the New York-based firm Pei Cobb Freed and Partners.

HUANG has been named one of the “50 under 50: Innovators of the 21st Century, and 2022 Wallpaper* China Design Awards | Designer of the Year. Huang taught at various institutions, including Tsinghua University, China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of Hong Kong. Recently, HUANG Wenjing and LI Hu co-authored three books about OPEN: OPEN Questions (2018), Towards Openness (2018), and OPEN Reaction (2015). #WIKID

Publishment
Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, who co-authored these books and co-founded OPEN Architecture in Beijing in 2008, belong to a new wave of architects whose education and practice grew out of the Western system. Similar to the generation of architects that preceded them,upon starting their own architectural practice in their homeland, the two architects found themselves in a large professional knowledge gap. This had been formed in the space between their ten years of practice in the developed architectural industry in the USA and the more rapidly developing urban context that conditioned almost every architectural project in China. Later they wrote Towards opennes, their first English monograph, Towards Openness (2017)—elucidates the living tradition of Modernism and its potentially larger, incomplete, and reinvented Chinese project, most context comes from open conversations with the architect-authors. #WIKID

Gehua Youth and Cultural Centre
The building space of the camp is transparent and open, and the flexible internal space can well respond to different functional needs. The space is arranged around the central inner courtyard, taking advantage of the 3-meter height difference on the site to naturally form different activity areas. The zigzag path paved with green bricks in the courtyard not only connects the different levels but also becomes an interesting landscape element. At one end of the courtyard is a small theater with 120 seats. The theater has two large folding door walls that can be opened facing the courtyard. The outdoor courtyard is incorporated into the theater space, and the small theater suddenly transforms into a brand new large-scale performance venue. #WIKID