Hua Li – Trace Architecture Office (TAO)
‘Doing architecture, we are anticipating the future, but with our memory. Architecture is a dramatic meeting between past and future, while has to be realised by present means. Thus architecture belongs to a time, but it can also go beyond its time. Architecture without style.’ Hua Li.
Hua Li is Principal at Trace Architecture Office (TAO), a practice he founded in 2009 in Beijing as a design studio committed to architecture, urban, landscape and furniture design.
Hua Li received his M Arch from Yale University in 1999 and his B Arch from Tsinghua University in 1994. He worked as an architect in New York until 2002 and then in 2003 returned to China and established Universal Architecture Studio (UAS) in Beijing. Since 2004, he has taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and been a visiting critic at Tsinghua University. In 2009, he established TAO. Hua Li’s design works and interviews have been published by Area, domus, T+A, WA, Wallpaper, Abitare and Space.
The notions of trace and process are at the heart of TAO’s work. A trace is the surviving mark of things, and evidence of the accumulation of time, while the production of architecture is a process of confrontation with various will powers and values, full of contradiction and complexity. Architecture itself is a record of its time and nature.
TAO is concerned with the social, cultural and ecological significance in the process of making architecture: from design to construction. While architecture always faces the conflict between past, present and future, between regional and global, between individual and collective, TAO rejects a simple and brutal attitude and explores how to achieve a subtle balance.
TAO is critical of architecture as an obsession to fancy forms in the context of media based globalised consumerism and becoming fashion or dogma. The sense of place, response to climate, material and construction method, efficient use of resource, these fundamental subjects are explored with specific condition in each TAO works.
Hua Li is just one of the many speakers at Spirit of Place. For all the details, visit the Spirit of Place website.