Zhaoyang Architects

Architect Yang Zhao established his own practice, Zhaoyang Studio, in 2007. For the first three years, the studio worked closely with standard architecture, a leading new-generation design firm, in Beijing. Zhao was awarded the 2010 WA Chinese Architecture award from Beijing-based world architecture magazine. In the same year, Zhao attended the harvard graduate school of design where he received a master’s degree in architecture with distinction. After graduation, Zhao moved to Dali, Yunnan province. From a series of experimental projects such as “Shuangzi Resort” and “Zhu’an Residence”, the practice tries to explore architectural solutions to the emerging Chinese urban and rural conditions. and relate architecture to a tangible social, cultural and natural background, a tradition that’s long forgotten by the contemporary design and building industry in China.

In the words of Erwin Viray, in the introductory essay, The Asian Everyday : possibilities in the shifting world, Toto Publishing, 2015 - "The architectural works of Yang Zhao, look modern and abstract, a vision of now, rather than an imitation of past forms, but deep beneath there is an underlying idea that is from the past, the idea of the order in the genus loci, the order of things in a place that give it form, movement, and rhythm. Yang Zhao strives to knowing the raison d'etre in a place, and then expressing them as they are in the new form of now. The act is courageous and visionary, in sensitively and sensibly responding to the particular conditions of approaching making architecture in a fast changing China."

Erwin Viray is a committee member of Toto Gallery MA and Professor of the Department of Design and Architecture in the Kyoto Institute of Technology, School of Science and Technology.