2025 Architectural Record Awards Winner: Shanfeng Les Roches School

Chongming Island, China

Architects & Firms

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is designing the multipurpose cultural quarter of the Shanfeng Les Roches School—a new vocational institution founded in collaboration with the Swiss hospitality academy of the same name. The school will be located on the eastern tip of Chongming Island, an alluvial wetland on the Yangtze River that is rapidly developing into a suburb of Shanghai. Plans include 205,000 square feet for a diverse program: a black-box theater, art center, bookstore, retail and restaurant spaces, and a 102-key guest faculty dormitory and hotel, which will be accessible to students, teachers, and the greater community. The architects treat the awkwardly shaped plot—bound by a running track and soccer pitch, an existing building, a road, and a canal—as a field condition populated by discrete volumes. Neri&Hu will use red concrete and brick throughout to create a sense of cohesion.

“Epitomizing what the jury felt an unbuilt work should do, Neri&Hu’s submission pushes ideas to an extreme to provoke and advance our collective dialogue about contemporary architecture. Following a dream logic that collages together suggestive fragments of heterogeneous modernisms, the design produces a cinematic unfolding of distinct environments unified through a common tonal palette of brick, red concrete, and terra-cotta.”

- Benjamin Gilmartin