Guangzhou-based O-office Architects is in the process of converting 18 former factory buildings on a 20-acre site into artists’ studios, hotels, a conference center, and more. In China’s booming Pearl River Delta, the former Honghua Printing and Dyeing Factory—long vacant and overgrown—has recently been rebranded as iD TOWN art district. Guangzhou-based O-office Architects is in the process of converting its 18 buildings on a 20-acre site into artists’ studios, hotels, a conference center, and more. On January 11, the exhibition Organism opened iD TOWN to the public and inaugurated its gallery space in the first renovated building in what is

How did a phone call to Paris launch an architecture firm in Seoul? “It was kind of destiny,” says JOHO Architecture principal Jeonghoon Lee.

For his first building since winning the Pritzker Prize, Wang Shu gives a lesson in craftsmanship and material expression through an unfolding interior landscape.

Photo courtesy China Lewis Mumford Research Center The China Lewis Mumford Research Center opened at Shanghai Normal University on October 19 with a ceremony and symposium. Amid China’s frenzied urban development, what would Mumford do? Lewis Mumford, the 20th-century urbanist and polymath whose seminal book The City in History argued for the organic growth of cities, might seem irrelevant to the contemporary study of top-down planning in China. The leaders of the newly established China Lewis Mumford Research Center think otherwise. Song Junling, who has translated Mumford’s writings into Chinese since 1982 and was instrumental in establishing the center, said

Jeju may seem an unlikely place to pioneer a new form of structural expressionism in office architecture.

Enter Mercato and your first impression is its rawness. The rough concrete, weathered steel, and exposed ductwork might seem out of place in Shanghai, a city where fine-dining interiors tend to be blingy.

View of Spectacle with “Unbuilt City” by Feng Lu and Liu Yuyang (foreground), “Future of the Museum in China” by China Megacities Lab/GSAPP Columbia University, directed by Jeffrey Johnson (rear left), “Bias” by Yu Ting (rear center), and “Museum of Unknown” by Qiu Anxiong (rear right). Right as the quantity, quality, and scale of new museums in China are reaching an apex, Shanghai’s new Power Station of Art (PSA) is addressing this phenomenon with a well-timed exhibition, Spectacle: 12 Presentations of Contemporary Museum Architecture in China, which runs through July 18. The title comes from the curators’—Zhang Ming, Bu Bing,

Edited by Stefan Al. Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 216 pages, $25. Where All Your Stuff Comes From Open this book and you cannot help but think of Great Leap Forward, the 2001 tome generated by Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at the Harvard Design School Project on the City. Both books are university-based, research-driven, essay-enhanced, muddy-photography-filled studies of urbanism in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), the manufacturing center of China. The dozen years between Great Leap's “initial overview” and this “critical evaluation” have been filled with enormous progress (or, some say, regress). In Factory Towns of South China, editor

Starter Apartments Faced with soaring prices of housing in urban China, what is a young college graduate to do? The Shanghai-based architecture firm DC Alliance provides one option in its Yinzhou Talent Apartments. The state-subsidized project in the Yinzhou district of Ningbo'a city of 5.7 million people three hours south of Shanghai'offers 1,000 rental units at a discount. It was developed by Yinzhou City Construction Investment Development Company, which is also responsible for the area's new central business district. The idea behind the apartment complex is to help university-educated people get started in Ningbo, a port city with four college