Faced with the horizontality of lakes and sheets of water, a brick wall rises that hides in its interior a spatial complexity based on the vernacular architecture of the region.
Neri & Hu presents this new luxury hotel near the east coast of China. The project unifies the space through a grid of courtyards bordered by recycled brick walls. Inside these courtyards, without touching the walls, the program is distributed, loading the corridors with a certain spatial tension. The architects play with this tension generating long perspectives between the rooms, and directing the light thanks to the brick patterns of the walls.
 

Description of project by Neri & Hu

Situated in close proximity to Yangzhou’s scenic Slender West Lake, the site given to Neri&Hu to design a 20-room boutique hotel was a challenging one, dotted with small lakes and a handful of existing structures. The design brief called for the adaptive reuse of several of the old buildings by giving them new functions, while adding new buildings to accommodate the hotel’s capacity needs. Neri&Hu’s strategy to unify these scattered elements was to overlay a grid of walls and paths onto the site to tie the entire project together, resulting in multiple courtyard enclosures. The inspiration for the design actually originates with the courtyard house typology of vernacular Chinese architecture. As with the traditional courtyard, the courtyard here gives hierarchy to the spaces, frames views of the sky and earth, encapsulates landscape into architecture, and creates an overlap between interior and exterior.

Constructed entirely from reclaimed grey brick, the gridded walls’ narrow interior passageway forces a long perspective, while light plays off the various brick patterns, enticing guests to venture ever deeper into the project. Within the walls, several of the courtyards are occupied by guest rooms and other shared amenities such as the reception, library, and restaurant. Many of the building roof lines are confined within the height of the walls surrounding them, so that they are not visible from afar. Hotel guests traverse the site using the walled pathways to discover their rooms. Once within, there is a clear separation between the building and the walls, a layering of privacy and a sliver of landscape for guests to enjoy. Other courtyards are unoccupied, pockets of lush garden to offer relief from the sense of enclosure.

Journeying along the walls, guests can also ascend through openings above to gain privileged vantage points that look out across the gridded landscape and beyond to the surrounding lakes. Here three additional buildings take their place in the panorama; the rising second floor of the largest courtyard building, a lakeside pavilion of four guestrooms, and a multifunction building at the furthest reaches of the site. Renovating the existing derelict warehouse building, with a partial new concrete addition, this multifunction building houses a restaurant, a theater and an exhibition space. With this project, Neri&Hu’s ambition lies in utilizing a strong landscape element -the wall and courtyard- to unify a complex site and program, while the rustic materiality and layered spaces seek to redefine tradition with a modern architectural language.

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Architect and Interior Designer
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Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Partners-in-charge.- Lyndon Neri, Rossana Hu.
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Design Team
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Partners, Principal in Charge.- Lyndon Neri & Rossana Hu Founding. Senior Associate.- Federico Saralvo. Associate.- Ziyi Cao. Senior Project Manager.- Fong Huang. Senior Architectural Designer.- Sela Lim, Valentina Brunetti and Zhao Lei. Callum Holgate , Leyue Chen, Sean Shen, Xin Liu and Bin Zhu. Associate, product design.- Nicolas Fardet. Yun Wang and Jin Zhang.
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Location
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1 Baocheng Road, Hanjiang District, Yangzhou, China.
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Dates
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November 2015 – October 2017.
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Area
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Site aera.- 32.000 sqm. Gross area.- 4.200 sqm.
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Program
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Boutique Hotel and Cultural event space.
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Materials
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Architectural.- Recycled Gray Brick, Exposed Aggregate Concrete, Recycled Gray Roof Tiles, Bamboo Engineered Wood, Raw Steel, White Plaster. Interiors.- Recycled Gray Brick, Concrete, Terrazzo, White Oak, Walnut, Bronze, Raw Steel. Fixtures & Fittings.- PG, Kohler, Duravit, Zucchetti. Decorative Lighting.- Lighting fixtures by Neri&Hu. Furniture.- Custom furniture by Neri&Hu.
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Photography
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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: March 8, 2018
Cite:
metalocus, INÉS OÑATE
"The Walled, Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat by Neri & Hu" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/walled-tsingpu-yangzhou-retreat-neri-hu> ISSN 1139-6415
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