UCLA AUD Fall 2024 Events: Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu: "Total Design"

November 25, 2024, 5:30 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe

“We aimed at realizing standards of excellence, not creating transient novelties. Experiment once more became the center of architecture, and that demands a broad, coordinating mind, not the narrow specialist.”
– Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (on the Bauhaus movement)

"Interdisciplinary" is a term that is used to describe practices that operate across design fields ranging from architecture to interior, product, furniture, graphic and fashion design, and even film. Our practice started out and grew from the design of small objects and over time we have transitioned into larger scales of architecture and master planning. “Interdisciplinary” is often recast as a new buzzword or trend in the design profession, but the basic tenets were established by the Bauhaus and Art Nouveau movements. Often associated too quickly with a particular “style”, we forget that these movements represented a larger collective ambition - a total design vision through means of controlling built environments from the large gestalt down to the smallest details.

Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are Founding Partners of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Whether through objects of intimate daily use or vessels of inhabitation, they seek an approach to design that draws from multiple disciplines to provide experiences that enrich contemporary life while still keeping a critical linkage to a collective history.

Alongside their design practice, Lyndon and Rossana have been deeply committed to architectural education and have lectured across the globe in various universities and professional forums, including University of California, Berkeley, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Yale School of Architecture and others. Rossana was appointed as Chair of the Department of Architecture at Tongji University in 2021 and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, effective spring semester 2024. Lyndon was recently appointed as Visiting Faculty at Princeton University School of Architecture, starting spring semester 2024.

Lyndon and Rossana are also Founding Partners of Design Republic in Shanghai since 2004, a design platform incorporating a retail concept, design and cultural exhibitions, and education.

Lyndon Neri received his Master of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

Rossana Hu received her Master of Architecture and Urban Planning at Princeton University and her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley with a minor in music.