Shanghai studio Neri&Hu has used wood-covered sticks and sandstone slabs to create a cavernous interior for a new cultural centre in the city's emerging Hongqiao district
The Performance and Exhibition Centre forms the centrepiece of The Hub, a huge mixed-use complex near one of Shanghai's main airports. Architect Ben Wood designed the exterior of the five-storey building, but Neri&Hu was tasked with the entire fit-out.

The studio based its design on natural landscape scenes, in the structures of the roots of the trees, cave ideas and constant layers of translucent images that make up the entire design. Scenography less cluttered than in other last projects, and also more impactful, clean and nitida.

Neri&Hu has worked on a number of projects in its home city, ranging from a house-like Camper shop to a italian restaurants and a hotel in an abandoned former army headquarters.
 

Description of project by Neri&Hu

The ongoing events and visitors that inhabit this urban oasis, together with the designed spatial elements, bring a transformative and invigorating life to a neighborhood in the making. As Shanghai expands, the Hongqiao District has become its new vibrant neighborhood because of the concentration of Hongqiao Railway and Subway Station, Hongqiao Airport, the new Convention Center and the CBD. The developer Shui On Land, the mastermind behind the Xintiandi development introduced the HUB mixed-use development in the heart of this new district. The highlight of this complex is the Performance and Exhibition Center that is envisioned as the “hot spot” of culture and arts of the new neighborhood.

The interior concept draws inspiration from landscape to create a nature-like environment that provides retreat from the heavily built context and visual overload of contemporary culture. The performance center interior is perceived as a five-story urban oasis in the form of as a solid rock set inside the exterior envelop; spaces are carved out and programmatic elements inserted. Visitors arriving from the subway station find themselves walking into an underground space, with the ceiling covered in metal tubes mimicking the roots of the forest above. 

A dramatic escalator tunnel with deep ceiling coves brings one out of the ground into the primary exhibition hall. A floating canopy of wood sticks hovering over the three-story atrium transforms the space into a forest. Gallery openings are wrapped in interlocking solid sandstone and light walnut balustrades. Wherever a visitor is, his/her role as the spectator and the partaker of a performance on stage is constantly alternating as one meanders along the cavernous galleries and bridges. Hidden above at the upper levels is the treasure box – a 750-seat performance hall with floating screens, associating with the bamboo slips from ancient China to “record” the stories inside. One can discover other delightful spaces carved into the sandstone mass throughout – golden toilet cubicals; cigar room, salon, and bars as wooden houses inserted into the rock; halls of mirror in black-glazed tiles with green toilet rooms; bronze elevator cabs; private VIP rooms dressed in hand-painted tiles that narrate the story of Hongqiao District’s humble past; and a golden trellis inside the VIP Lounge dotted with intricately crafted pendant lights.  

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Interior architect and designer
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Neri&Hu Design and Research Office
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Design team
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Lyndon Neri, Rossana Hu, Dirk Weiblen, Ellen Chen, Josef Zhou, Karen Lok, Mark Zhang, Cristina Felipe, Yiran Wang, Lorna de Santos, Yutian Zhang, Sophia Panova, Isabelle Lee, Brian Lo, Zhao Yun, Xiaowen Chen, Christine Neri, Siwei Park, Litien Poeng, Haiou Xin
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Location
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Shao Hong Lu, Minhang Qu, Shanghai Shi, China
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Area
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15700.0 sqm
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Project Year
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2015
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Decorative lighting
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Flos, Neri&Hu
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Architectural fixtures and fittings
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Toto, Kohler

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Furniture
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Stella Works, de la Espada, Neri&Hu, Hay
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Accessories
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Neri&Hu
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Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, founded in 2006 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. The practice’s burgeoning global portfolio includes commissions ranging from master planning and architecture to interior design, installation, furniture, product, branding and graphic works. Currently working on projects in many countries, Neri&Hu is composed of multi-cultural staff who speak over 30 different languages.  The team's diversity reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview, incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new architectural paradigm.

Neri&Hu’s location is purposeful. With Shanghai considered a new global frontier, Neri&Hu is in the immediate center of this contemporary chaos. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for design inquiries that span across a wide spectrum of scales. Furthermore, Neri&Hu has expanded the conventional boundaries of practice to include complementary disciplines. A critical probing into the specificities of program, site, function, and history is essential to the creation of rigorous work. Based on research, Neri&Hu anchors its ethos on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form, and light rather than conforming to a formulaic style.

Lyndon Neri, Honorary FAIA, co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office with Rossana Hu in 2006, an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai. 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. Alongside his design practice, Neri has been deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured at numerous universities. He was appointed as Visiting Faculty at Princeton University School of Architecture for the spring semesters of 2024 and 2025. Neri was appointed the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, the Design Critic in 2023 and the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture in 2019 and 2021 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. Neri co-authored and edited Persistence of Vision: Shanghai Architects in Dialogue, published by MCCM Creations in 2007. In 2017, his first monograph, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, was published by Park Books. In 2021, the second monograph, Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice, was published by Thames & Hudson, and the Chinese edition was translated and published in 2023 by Guangxi Normal University Press. Neri was elevated to Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2025.

Rossana Hu co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office with Lyndon Neri in 2006, an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai. 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.

Alongside her design practice, Hu has been deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured at numerous universities. Hu was appointed the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, the Design Critic in 2023 and the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture in 2019 and 2021 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. Hu 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.

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Published on: August 31, 2016
Cite:
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
"Theatre and Exhibition Center by Neri&Hu" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/theatre-and-exhibition-center-nerihu> ISSN 1139-6415
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