Architecture, Design and the Cultural Flows Across East and West: An Interview with Jonathan Yeung
You may listen to this interview from HERE.
Jonathan Yeung is a founding partner of YY Projects and a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. He has also lectured at THEi Hong Kong and Kyoto Seika University, and is a content editor for ArchDaily and a Curatorial Team Member of the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2025. His work includes the winning proposal for the Tai Kok Tsui Public Art Open Call 02 (RE: Find Tai Kok Tsui) and Merit Award in the 50th Nisshin Kogyo Architectural Design Competition. Previously based in New York, he practiced at Toshiko Mori Architect and has also worked with Michael Maltzan Architecture, Sasaki, and teamLab. Jonathan holds a M.Arch with Distinction from Harvard GSD and a B.A. in Architecture with Highest Honors from UC Berkeley (Alpha Rho Chi Medal).
Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.
I run a quiet Hong Kong–based design practice, YY Projects, together with my partner, Wing. Our work spans residential renovations, exhibitions, adaptive reuse, and temporary public interventions, with projects mainly in Hong Kong and on the U.S. West Coast. In parallel, I teach undergraduate architecture studios at the University of Hong Kong and serve as an editor at ArchDaily. I’m also part of the curatorial team for the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2025 and its roving exhibition, where we worked on documenting and projecting an archive of Hong Kong post-war buildings, and the quiet knowledge they contain.
My current focus is on sustaining a productive balance between teaching and research, writing and critical evaluation, and practice and building. Through YY Projects, I’m particularly interested in how measured, precise architecture—through detailing, material choices, and light—shapes everyday spatial experience: thresholds, circulation, and the small decisions that influence how people gather, move, and feel in a space.
Q2. How does someone become an architect? Please share the academic and training requirements, and what are the career paths architects typically follow?
There’s an important distinction between licensed architects (registered in a specific jurisdiction and able to sign drawings) and those trained in architecture who choose not to pursue or maintain licensure. Unlike medicine or law, architecture these days, in the international, contemporary setting, can be practiced in multiple ways. Many professionals work as “design architects,” shaping a project’s early phases—program, spatial strategy, concept, massing, material direction, budget alignment, and sometimes also design construction details—without signing construction documents. In these cases, local licensed professionals typically handle code compliance, documentation, and project delivery. This model is common internationally: renowned firms often rely on local partners for execution in cities where they are not licensed.
Regardless of path, the training is substantial: typically 4 years undergraduate + 2–3 years graduate (or a 5-year professional undergraduate degree), followed by supervised experience before licensure exams, depending on the region. Even without licensure, it is generally typical to consider a minimum of a decade of combined education and practice for an architect to truly begin their career under current systems and common practices.
Q3. Architects are trained to think in terms of scale. What does that mean and how is it related to the methods you use to address issues around design parameters and choices?
In the pre–digital software era, architects were forced to think through scales. Ideas could be drawn, measured, and tested through physical models, but there was no seamless interface that allowed infinite zoom and the illusion that scale could be erased. That constraint was productive: it trained designers to separate information, prioritize what matters, and move between levels of resolution without collapsing them into one confused problem. In any building project—and really any complex task—it is impossible to address everything at once. Diving straight in without a structure makes the work feel insurmountable, while solving isolated pieces to “100%” too early often produces brittle decisions that fail when the larger system shifts.
Scale offers a discipline for focus. A drawing at 1/16″ = 1′-0″ should not be burdened with screw locations or joinery; it is a tool for organizing plan relationships—room adjacency, alignment, circulation, program logic, etc. A drawing at 1″ = 1′-0″, by contrast, is precisely where material assemblies, tolerances, shadow lines, and reveals belong. By segmenting problems into the appropriate scale, designers avoid trying to solve complexity in a single move. Each layer becomes legible, and the project can be resynthesized into a coherent whole.
This is one of the most transferable strengths of architectural training. Thinking in scale is ultimately a method of problem-solving: breaking a system into hierarchies, resolving each with the right level of attention, and then recombining them without being distracted by noise from a different “conversation.” It applies well beyond design—any field that requires clarity, prioritization, and synthesis under complexity benefits from the same discipline.
Q4. In a more general sense, how do architects think about space? You’ve noted that the basic principles of creating space are either additive (layering) or subtractive (carving). Please expand on those concepts and provide some examples.
I may be challenged on this, but spatial thinking can often be reduced to two operative methods: additive and subtractive—layering/stacking versus carving. At its core, designing space begins with a simple recognition of mass (solid) and void (empty). A void can be produced additively by assembling boundaries—planes, frames, and surfaces—so that enclosure (or even the suggestion of enclosure) allows space to register. A void can also be produced subtractively by removing material from a solid, where the act of carving simultaneously generates emptiness and defines its edges.
Many projects can be read clearly through this binary. Both examples below come from Toyo Ito—one of my personal favorites. Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque in Japan, for instance, is vividly additive: stacked floor plates and a field of structural tubes that thicken, bundle, and become spatial organizers. By contrast, Ito’s Taichung Metropolitan Opera House in Taiwan is fundamentally subtractive—experienced as if cavities were excavated from a solid volume, producing continuous, cave-like interiors through an extraordinary synthesis of three-dimensional geometry and engineering.
Q5. How are trends determined in your industry? How do you even think about this in an era of social media and algorithm driven content? Are there still overarching trends and themes or is the focus increasingly on micro-trends that depend on the bubbles in which people inhabit?
Within architecture, “trend” is a slippery term. Trained architects are wired to treat each project as specific—shaped by site, context, program, client, and material—rather than to reproduce a fixed style. Some practitioners do develop a consistent voice across many projects, but that is closer to authorship than a trend. More often, “trends” are produced on the receiving end—by media and clients looking for quick labels that make design feel legible. In interiors, terms like “Japandi,” “Scandinavian,” or “Industrial” can be convenient shorthand, but they are often so broad and imprecise that they risk flattening judgment and narrowing decision-making rather than clarifying it.
Social media and algorithms intensify this effect. Platforms latch onto anything nameable and then cluster it—sometimes based on superficial signals like background music, palette, or a single detail—into Search Engine Optimization-driven categories that get fed back to audiences as preference. This can be useful as a starting reference, and it can help clients articulate what they respond to. But it also produces micro-bubbles: reduced diversity, repetitive visual cultures, and a browsing environment where it becomes harder to encounter work that sits outside the algorithm’s definition of taste.
Q6. In your career, you have worked for Western and Japanese firms, and studied in the US, Japan and the UK. After relocating to Hong Kong, you now devote more time to projects in HK, China and other parts of Asia. How has your multi-cultural background influenced your design preferences? Do each of these cultural worlds you inhabit have their own unique aesthetics or do you see a growing trend towards more conformity and homogeneity?
I’m grateful for the chance to work and study across different cities and cultural contexts, and that exposure has fundamentally shaped how I think and practice. Working in multiple settings sharpens an awareness that architecture is as much about communication and coordination as it is about design intent. What gets built is often constrained not by what is “engineered” in theory, but by what builders can execute with confidence—based on local practices, material familiarity, sequencing, and the realities of site labor. Designing well therefore means designing for the people who will build it: understanding what materials are workable, how details will be interpreted, and how tolerances and expectations of precision vary from one context to another.
Aesthetically, while I value the specificity of beauty in different places, I also believe there are shared standards that travel: clarity, coherence, and care in execution. This does not imply homogenization. A project can be resolved through sharp metal edges and minimal restraint, or through richly worked stone and timber in an elaborate interior—yet both can aim for the same underlying qualities of authenticity, proportion, and precision. Across contexts, the design language may differ, but the discipline of making should still be universally legible and appreciated.
Q7. What trends or design innovations are you seeing coming from China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, and who are notable architects from these places that readers should know about?
Across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, a noticeable “innovation” isn’t a single visual style so much as a shift in priorities. There is a renewed respect for clarity, restraint, and credibility in execution. Simplicity here doesn’t automatically mean minimalism. It reads more as effortlessness: fewer gratuitous moves, cleaner spatial hierarchies, and details that feel inevitable rather than over-authored. “Authenticity” likewise is less about any romantic material agenda and more about legibility—how structure, envelope, and building services are integrated (or at least honestly negotiated) rather than concealed through heavy cover-up systems.
At the same time, the region is also producing the opposite: increasingly sophisticated “cover-up” techniques that standardize atmosphere quickly and cost-effectively—driven by developer logic, speed, and social-media legibility. The result is a widening split in the market: quiet, rigorous work on one end, and highly consumable, image-forward interiors and façades on the other, with fewer projects occupying the middle.
In terms of notable architects and offices in the region, a few that come to mind are Wang Shu and Liu Jiakun (both Pritzker laureates), Neri&Hu (Shanghai), Xu Tiantian / DnA (Beijing), FCJZ (Beijing), and Pang Architects (Hong Kong).
Q8. In China today we are seeing cultural pride and nationalism finding expression in design preferences. What do you think are good examples of how this can be done thoughtfully? Conversely, is there a risk that an excessive desire to virtue signal how much you love China can lead to design decisions that fall short of achieving something meaningful?
Cultural pride can be an essential driver for any region to produce work that is memorable and authentic, but it should not be conflated with a blind belief that “made in China” is automatically good. Some of the most compelling projects in the region demonstrate cultural confidence without relying on slogans or surface symbolism. Examples include Jiakun Architects’ Renovation of the Tianbao Cave District in Erlang Town and West Village (Basis Yard), as well as DnA’s quarry projects. What makes these works persuasive is their directness. They are unmistakably of China—serving local life and landscape—yet their cultural specificity comes through tectonic clarity, disciplined execution, and genuine adaptation to context, rather than marketing gestures.
Q9. We’re seeing more interest in adaptive reuse in countries across the world. What does this mean and can you share examples of these types of projects? How do architects think through the issues of what to keep from an existing structure and in your view, what does a successful balance look like?
Adaptive reuse matters to me less as a debate about what must be “preserved,” and more as a discipline of layering—building with what already exists. Working on top of an inherited structure creates depth, carries traces of time forward, and allows a city’s lived history to remain legible within contemporary development. Beyond officially “historic” buildings, it’s encouraging to see adaptive reuse applied to ordinary structures as well, not as a protectionist gesture, but as a simple acknowledgement that continuity can be more meaningful than a perpetual cycle of demolition and replacement, which too often leaves cities without memory of their own making.
In Hong Kong, two touchstones are Asia Society Hong Kong Center (Tod Williams Billie Tsien) and Tai Kwun (Herzog & de Meuron). In Tokyo, Herzog & de Meuron’s UNIQLO Tokyo flagship at Marronnier Gate Ginza 2 is a widely encountered example that makes the potential of reuse visible to everyday visitors. And in Bangkok, Bangkok Kunsthalle offers a particularly raw model: a fire-damaged industrial shell adapted into a gallery that remains open to ongoing repair, adjustment, and accretive change—reuse not as a finished image, but as a living process.
Q10. In this world of fast fashion, hot takes, Internet memes and short attention spans, how has architectural design responded? Is it fair to label exhibition design or pop-ups a response to these trends through the creation of temporary, ephemeral projects? What role do they play in the industry, and do you see them as a net positive?
One challenge in architecture is that a building’s timeline rarely aligns with an economic cycle—or even the tenure of a client team—so the “returns” can be difficult to measure and may only become legible years after completion. That long horizon sits uneasily with today’s short attention spans, and even public-sector projects feel less stable as priorities shift with election cycles and leadership changes.
Pop-ups, exhibitions, and urban installations have emerged as a bridge: fast-paced, lower-commitment projects that can satisfy institutional KPIs and test ideas with comparatively limited risk, even if the cost-per-day is high. They can be a net positive, creating more opportunities and encouraging experimentation, so long as they are treated as genuine prototypes rather than disposable crowd-pleasers. The strength of temporary work is its ability to challenge conventions and provoke new conversations. However, if reduced to short-lived spectacle, it becomes harder to justify both financially and environmentally.
Q11. It is difficult to discuss design without considering China’s brutally competitive manufacturing sector. While original designs and brands are flourishing in China, there is still copying of intellectual property that is then sold to a global mass market. With this in mind, how do you think through the concept of value? Can you still be considered to appreciate the design history, IP and aesthetic value of something if you’ve purchased a knock off? How do you look at this from the perspective of the designer and IP owner who sees this as fraud or from the perspective of the consumer who covets but cannot afford an original?
It’s a complicated question because “value” in design sits at the intersection of ethics, labor, access, and culture, and those boundaries are understood differently across contexts. Rather than debating legal specifics, I tend to define value by what an object actually carries. This refers to the authorship, the labor and craft behind it, material performance, and the ecosystem that supports invention over time, such as R&D, prototyping, warranty, repair, and the ability for designers and brands to keep taking risks.
China’s manufacturing capacity, in itself, is not about counterfeits. It is a powerful system of making that enables prototyping, customization, and high-quality production at a scale few places can match. The ethical tension emerges in the grey zone, where “inspired by,” “untraceable vintage,” or minor tweaks are used to blur authorship. Appreciation can still exist, but it becomes partial when a purchase bypasses authorship. This is why many brands now emphasize traceability, including serial numbers engraved or mechanically imprinted, along with aftersales support and resale value—qualities that are harder to counterfeit and that locate value beyond appearance.
Ultimately, the burden is shared. Manufacturers provide capability, but consumers need self-discipline and clarity of intent—using the system to develop original work through designers or commission legitimate custom pieces with provenance, rather than reproducing someone else’s authorship.
Q12. For the following images you have selected, please share why you have chosen them and how a lay person might better appreciate them from an architectural design perspective.
This drawing was produced during my time working in New York as a diagrammatic tool to help clients understand what actually happens at the threshold—the interface where sliding door and window systems meet the building envelope. What I value in the image is how it exposes an often-overlooked architectural fundamental: the weather barrier. A seamless inside–outside transition may read as “simple” or “minimal” in appearance, but it is typically the result of intensive coordination and calibration.
The diagram traces how that apparent simplicity is assembled: exterior drainage coordinated with landscape design and the window manufacturer; recessed track inserts aligned with structural steel and the structural engineer; perimeter HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) integration alongside glazing with MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) consultants. There are concealed solar shades and insect screens housed in the ceiling yet designed for near-complete coverage when deployed, and terrace insulation and waterproofing strategies above. In other words, a banal condition becomes credible only through clear intent, disciplined detailing, and tectonic coherence.
This is the hidden value of architecture: not complexity for its own sake, but the effort required to make everyday transitions feel effortless. Of course, people can live with ad hoc solutions—raised curbs, occasional leaks, exposed blinds, no insect screen, no perimeter conditioning—but the difference is whether one accepts compromise as inevitable, or treats “simplicity” as something that must be carefully made.
Another strong example of architecture “taking place” is The Commons in Bangkok by the design studio Department of Architecture. The project embraces a bare concrete language and treats outdoor conditions not as a problem to erase, but as a climate to live with. It prioritizes passive strategies that move air and creates a genuinely tolerable comfort without externalizing the cost through energy-intensive cooling that simply dumps heat back into the city.
What is most compelling is the building’s blunt honesty and coordination. Slab thickness is locally increased, calibrated to structural zones and the demands of the plan. Handrails are tectonically expressed, resolving corners and panel divisions with quiet precision, and occupied terraces are protected by metal fascias and guardrails while unoccupied edges remain raw concrete. Services—electrical and water conduits—are routed with a clarity that makes the building’s support systems legible rather than hidden. Nothing is “covered up”, yet the result is minimal, effective, and highly resolved across trades. Instead of forcing the climate into submission, the project works with Bangkok’s realities—materials, shade, airflow, and modest energy—to produce a curated community environment that feels both robust, generous, and beautiful.
Q13. What do you see is the role of AI in your industry? Is the automation of design a threat or just another tool? Much of what you do involves working with people, logistics, materials, tolerances, changing site conditions, and other factors. Where does AI fit into this and what are its relative strengths and weaknesses?
Architecture is ultimately a people-centered industry. Buildings come into being through coordination with on-site trades, off-site fabricators, manufacturers, consultants across disciplines, clients and end users, and the agencies that review and approve the work. AI is still a long way from navigating the human dynamics that hold these relationships together. These include reading tone, trust, tacit priorities, and the small cues that shape judgment calls in real time.
As a design tool, though, AI is already powerful, especially in visualization and early-stage ideation. Fast image generation can accelerate communication, but it also produces convincing fictions. These include images that look plausible to clients while quietly violating constraints that a seasoned architect spots immediately—buildability, tolerances, servicing, code, sequencing, and cost. In practice, AI is most valuable as an assistant, helping small teams move faster in concept development, options testing, documentation support, and even budgeting and project-management workflows. Where it still falls short is in engaging physical reality and lived conditions—the site, material thickness and texture, construction sequence, and the messy social choreography of coordination. That gap keeps the architect’s role, especially as integrator and facilitator, highly relevant for now, even if the broader question of how the market values that role continues to evolve.
Q14. How do climate change and environmental issues factor into the work you do? As an industry that creates spaces at the intersection of humanity and the natural world, how do you think through these issues? When politicians attack climate science or weaken environmental protections, does that have an impact on your industry?
Rather than relying on blanket rules that steer sustainability through checklists—often degenerating into consultant-heavy compliance, over-calculation to meet certification criteria, or “net-zero” claims achieved through purchased offsets—I believe the industry (together with clients) can make a more direct impact by prioritizing passive comfort and low-waste mechanical strategies. In practice, that means getting the basics right: thoughtful orientation and shading, natural ventilation where feasible, robust insulation and airtightness to properly separate interior and exterior conditions. And, when systems are necessary, favoring efficient approaches such as radiant conditioning over energy-intensive air-cooled solutions.
From what I’ve observed, current frameworks have been effective at changing how teams document sustainability and chase milestones, which is a start, but long-term progress depends on design judgment and balance—making buildings that are comfortable, durable, and materially responsible as a default, not as a badge.
Q15. In a world divided by culture wars, religion, ethnonationalism, or online tribalism, how do you see your industry in this context? As your role is arguably to design structures for everyone, does this give you any insight or empathy that crosses cultural divides?
Architecture, to me, is always about clarity and balance. In a world that is becoming more extreme and divergent, placemaking can be one of the few practical ways to bring people back into shared reality again. It is easy to forget that an account number online is a person on the other side, while physical space reintroduces bodies, voice, proximity, and consequence. Designing everyday structures where people can believe different things, yet still occupy the same ground, without immediately escalating into conflict, matters as a kind of spatial politics. This is not in the sense of forcing agreement, but in providing conditions for a healthier conversation and a more resilient civic life.
What worries me is a future where public life is increasingly displaced into algorithmically segregated feeds, while physical space is treated as secondary. When discourse becomes fully siloed and disembodied, the first moment of real encounter can feel like a shock—one that risks collapsing into coercion, whether economic or physical. In that context, architecture’s role is quietly urgent. It is there to protect and design the “in-between” spaces of society—thresholds, commons, and every day public rooms—where differences can remain visible, negotiated, and lived with, rather than amplified into hostility at a distance.
Q16. Please share any favorite books, publications, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of architecture, design, culture or other related topics.
For architecture publications, El Croquis, A+U, and Log remain essential. I still prefer them in print, as there’s a tactile discipline to printed matter that “fixes” a project at a readable scale, rather than allowing it to dissolve into endlessly zoomable images that register differently on a phone, tablet, or desktop. Reading in print also slows perception down: drawings, sequencing, and proportions become harder to skim and easier to actually understand.
On the book side, I often revisit Kenya Hara’s Designing Design for its clarity on what design is, and what it isn’t. His Architecture for Dogs initiative is also unexpectedly insightful. It uses a playful brief to reveal how serious spatial thinking can be, and how much complexity is involved in producing what appears, at first glance, to be a simple, comfortable, and sensible design.
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