Established in Shanghai, Domain Architects is a studio led by Mr. XU Xiaomeng, operating within the boundaries of architecture, urbanism, landscape, interior and product design. Our practice strives to reform architectural experience with innovative site strategy. In our opinion, designing architecture is not about drawing physical things, but to create unique and attractive experiences. Then the architecture would naturally grow up to enable the experience.
China has been undergoing vast scale construction in the past decades, while replicability is usually prior to experience. The situation is improving but many new projects are still no more than a few pretty images. Never wanted to take this easy approach, we keep going back to the original nature of sites and programs to reinvent the experience and thus its spatial logic in a substantial level.
Consciously or unconsciously, our exploration is deeply rooted in Chinese culture traditions in an abstract way: elderly care center is scattered into small volumes and then reconnected with a network of corridors and courtyards; hotel rooms are transformed into micro yards with carefully concealed and revealed views; a visitor center is broken into a cluster of pavilions on water, evoking the atmosphere in ancient Chinese landscape paintings… We believe that every site has a great potential to generate unprecedented experience or novel ways to re-experience a familiar place.
Mr. Xu Xiaomeng, the founder of the studio, was born in Beijing. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania with B.A. in architecture and then obtained Master of Architecture from Columbia University.