Yu Ting, one of the two founders of the Shanghai-based firm Wutopia Lab, describes himself as an “architect, gourmet, and columnist” and stays busy in each of those pursuits. In addition to running his architectural practice with cofounder Min Erni, 37, he writes articles on food for the Xinmin Evening News and on culture and his home city for various publications. Along with Dai Chun, an editor at Time + Architecture magazine, published by Tongji University in Shanghai, he runs Let’s Talk, a forum that has hosted more than 100 discussions with architects, designers, and thinkers during the past three years, and Urban Micro Space Revival Plan, an effort to research and activate small “lost” spaces scattered throughout Shanghai.
Yu, 46, revels in the diversity found in the city and approaches architecture as a “study of complex systems.” Instead of emphasizing simplicity in a messy world, he tries to bring different—even opposing—concepts together. This process of “antithesis” design resembles the way the Chinese language places different ideograms together, creating poetic juxtapositions that are often hard to translate. “Antithesis is all about relationships,” explains Yu.
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