Future Cities: Meet Lyndon Neri and Rossana Pang of Neri&Hu Design

In our Future Cities series, we sit down with prominent architects from across the Asia Pacific. In this segment, Lyndon Neri and Rossana Pang of Neri&Hu Design share their visions and dreams of a future city.

“The future of design will be less about personalities or celebrities, but about real people. The objective is to find real solutions for real issues that are close to our heart. The language of design will become more accessible to more people, like how the internet has broken barriers to communication.

There will be more public spaces with better architecture as a result of more involvement from the community. Design will involve more technology and be less about form and aesthetics. Not that these will no longer be important but form for the sake of form will take a backseat.

Architecture will continue to be a powerful tool for cultural and social invention. It will not only be used to build things of commercial purpose. Architecture will find expression in more spaces for public use, and thus become more accessible to the less privileged.

We’d like to do a school or an orphanage. Education has shaped people and progress, so we are interested in how the space within a place of learning and growing supports the flow and exchange of knowledge and interaction between people.

The search for meaning and purpose in our built environment is something that deeply resonates with us. Designing a place that explores these would be a dream project. We see an orphanage as a place of restoration and redemption as well.

We can’t say more about the design now as it will depend on the programme, focus or curriculum of the school. One thing is definite: we’d look into the possibilities of increasing interaction between the students or wards. We’d be asking ourselves questions like, ‘Shall we establish a visual connection between different floors so that students can interact more easily?’”

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