Constructing Practice: O-office Architects

He Jianxiang and Jiang Ying, of O-office Architects, talk about their influences, projects, and the challenge of being an independent practice in China, where the architecture market is driven by public projects. Constructing Practice traces the narratives of young firms from around the globe, featuring the participants of a Columbia GSAPP symposium that took place on November 17, 2017, and expands the conversation to include many others, to tell us how they do what they do. Hosted by GSAPP Professor Juan Herreros, principal of Estudio Herreros in Madrid.

O-office Architects is a Guangzhou-based practice established by He Jianxiang and Jiang Ying in 2007. Motivated to explore new architectural possibilities in Guangzhou, or Canton, the oldest international trading port of China, He and Jiang have been attempting to test their methodology in spatial intervention across different scales. Parallel to professional practice, they have persisted in using architectural design as a critical instrument for research on the spatial and economic reality, and struggle to maintain the balance the two. Since 2012, conservation of the urban memory and construction of new collectivist living forms in the rapid-developing Pearl River Delta area has been O-office’s main design focus. Projects of O-office range from urbanism, architecture, and landscape, to interior and furniture design. In 2015, O-office was recognized by Architectural Record as a Design Vanguard practice.

“On one hand we are kind of outsiders [having trained and worked in Europe]. We observe the local culture in a different way. But at the same time, because we are local, we work directly with the client, with local workers together. So it’s kind of a combination of outsider and insider practice in this way, and this creates a very special way of operating.”
—He Jianxiang

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