Trained as an architect in Berkeley, California in the early 1980s, Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang (Beijing, 1956) founded the Beijing-based Atelier FCJZ together with his partner Lijia Lu back in 1993. Known as China’s first independent architectural firm, Atelier FCJZ looks at design from a cross-disciplinary perspective, exploring subjects as diverse as furniture design, theatre costumes, architecture and urbanism. 

Crystallised in a major retrospective entitled “Yung Ho Chang + FCJZ: Material-ism”, presented at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2012), Yung Ho Chang’s architectural vision focuses on research and craft. Distilling a sense of elonging in each of his designs, the architect takes advantage of any resource available on a local scale (bamboo, rammed earth,...fibreglass), seeing no contradictions in the use of both old and new technologies. Such versatility in the choice of materials has led Atelier FCJZ to conceive contemporary yet eclectic structures.

Among the many projects developed by the studio, are the Jishou Art Museum, composed of two bridges one on top of another (2018), the brutalist looking Museum-bridge (Anren, China, 2009), which stands as both a museum dedicated to the Chinese Great Cultural Revolution period and a pedestrian bridge over a river, and the Vertical Glass House, a conceptual building merging a solid concrete envelop with an interior composed of transparent ceilings and walls, built on the occasion of the first edition of the West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art (Shanghai, 2013).

Internationally acclaimed, Yung Ho Chang was a member of the Pritzker Prize Jury between 2011 and 2017 and currently teaches architecture at the MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.