Located south of Guozijian Street in a peaceful hutong—one of the traditional alleyways of old Beijing—OPEN’s office is part of a historic industrial complex, once the first machinery factory in Beijing after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The building lay abandoned until 2007, when the surrounding complex began to be transformed into an office compound targeting the creative industries. OPEN’s founding partners Li Hu and Huang Wenjing originally chose the building for the newly-founded Studio-X Beijing, run by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and directed at the time by Li. In 2015, when Studio-X stopped its operations, OPEN moved its office into the renovated space.