O-office Architects is one of the most interesting and lively practices in the contemporary Chinese architecture scene. It was founded in Guangzhou in 2007 by Jianxiang He (Xinhui, 1972) and Ying Jiang (Nanning, 1976), who both trained in Europe. With precision and tact, the office has been working regionally in the changeable, rapidly evolving conditions of China. The model they propose aims to oppose the imperatives of generic architecture that is linked only to the logics of profit. Resistance is a concept that O-office has diversified in its many projects for the conversion and reuse of existing buildings. These assignments are interpreted as gestures that can preserve the heterogeneity of urban space, and as opportunities to experiment with new ways of dealing with memory.

The projects Stone Art Gallery (Guangzhou, 2013), iD-town (Shenzhen, 2014) and the Lianzhou Museum of Photography (2018) concern pre-existing post-industrial structures that O-office has coaxed into generating diffuse urban quality. The latter – the seat of a major Chinese photography festival – became a stratagem to revitalise the entire historical fabric of the city. Here, the original architectural volume is embraced by a new construction that wraps around it on three sides, resulting in a network of routes that give life to unexpected spatiality originating in the juxtaposition of the two elements.

In parallel, the architects have been focusing their attention in recent years on the design of collective space in hyper-densified urban areas. At the Hongling experimental elementary school (Shenzhen, 2019), O-office proposes a new paradigm for the diversification of public space and its connection. The backbone of the project is made up of solutions that favour the organicity and fluidity of links between the parts.