OPEN's two projects, Tank Shanghai and UCCA Dune Art Museum , each won an Interior Design 2019 Best of Year Award in the ceremony held in New York City on December 6th, standing out from 2,638 entries this year.

Launched by the prestigious global publication Interior Design magazine, Best of Year program honors the most significant work of the year in every design category and recognizes the industry’s leading interior designers, architects, and manufacturers from around the globe. Now celebrating its 14th year, it showcases the development trend in design while simultaneously setting the benchmark even higher for the future.  

Tank Shanghai is the winner in Greater Good: Social Impact category, a newly-added category honoring projects that give back to the community and advance social equity and inclusion. UCCA Dune Art Museum is the winner in Large Museum/Art Gallery category. 

With the last pour of structural concrete, OPEN's new project Chapel of Sound topped out on November 15th. The pouring of concrete for the roof which is the largest flat surface in the project took about 24 hours. Workers continued on shifts all through the night, carefully finishing the surfaces with hand tools immediately after each batch of concrete was poured in place. They cheered and celebrated when the day broke and morning sun started to glitter on the freshly finished roof plane, concluding this year's construction before winter settles in. 

Chapel of Sound sits in a rocky valley at the foot of Jinshanling Great Wall on the northern boundary of Beijing municipality. It houses a semi-outdoor amphitheater, an outdoor stage, viewing platforms, and supporting spaces. The building is slated to open in the summer of 2020.

OPEN’s UCCA Dune Art Museum has won the 2019 LEAF Awards “Best Arts & Culture Building Project”. Launched in 2001, the LEAF (Leading European Architects Forum) Awards celebrates some of the influential and outstanding projects and personalities in the built environment and the international architectural communities. This year’s prestigious judging panel includes Archigram’s founder Sir Peter Cook, and directors from Henning Larson and Zaha Hadid Architects. OPEN’s Tank Shanghai also entered this year’s shortlist of the "Best Arts & Culture Building" category.

OPEN’s recent project, Tank Shanghai, has been awarded Honorable Mentions in the “Spaces, Places, and Cities”, and “Best Design Asia-Pacific” categories in Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards 2019.

Established by one of the most influential and recognized American business magazines Fast Company, Innovation by Design Awards is the only competition to honor creative work at the intersection of design, b usiness, and innovation. This year’s honorees stand out from more than 4,300 entries – a record – across 22 categories including fashion, architecture, graphic design, data visualization, social good, user experience, and more.

OPEN's UCCA Dune Art Museum has won the 2019 AZ Awards, as the 'Best in Buildings Under 1,000 Square Metres category', selected by a judging panel comprised of 5 leading figures in the architectural and design fields including Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. The jury stated “the Dune Art Museum embodies a unique relationship between interior and exterior. The space speaks of the place, and the materiality coherently fosters the concept.”

Launched in 2011 by AZURE, a leading North American magazine focused on contemporary architecture and design, the AZ Awards 'showcases the world's best projects, products and ideas'.

OPEN’s founding partner LI Hu lectured at 2019 MINDPARK Creative Summit in Shenzhen, sharing his reflections on ‘what modesty means to architecture and architectural practice’. As a response to the summit’s theme of “reshaping consumption”, LI stressed the urgent need for modesty in architecture in our current age of over-consumption.

OPEN’s founding partner LI Hu was invited to lecture at the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong on April 16, as part of the Department’s 2019 Spring Public Lecture Series. In this lecture, entitled “OPEN Questions”, LI presented his thoughts on how architecture can offer hope for the future by reacting to the challenges of today. He also discussed OPEN’s design approach and recent work done by the firm.

OPEN’s latest project, TANK Shanghai, has opened to the public on March 23rd. Located in Shanghai’s West Bund, the project transforms an abandoned airport into a vibrant urban art park woven around five decommissioned oil tanks. OPEN's design reinvents these industrial relics as galleries and other spaces for contemporary art and culture. TANK Shanghai has been featured in the 2018 Arts Preview of The New York Times and listed as one of the most anticipated art museums by a number of influential worldwide art and architectural media. Opening alongside the art center are three inaugural exhibitions: a group show of Chinese contemporary artists, Under Construction, a solo show of Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas, and the first Shanghai show of the Japanese art collective TeamLab: Universe of Water Particles in the Tank.

OPEN is proud to announce that the UCCA Dune Art Museum has been named 2019’s Cultural Building of the Year by the ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards! Organized by ArchDaily, this peer-based architectural award—the largest of its kind—recognizes inspiring buildings which advance architecture as a discipline. From the 4,000 projects which were entered into this year’s awards, the Dune Art Museum was selected as the winner of the award’s Cultural Building category through a democratic voting process in which over 80,000 readers participated.

OPEN’s Chapel of Sound, a unique semi-outdoor concert hall in northern China, has been awarded a Citation in the 66th annual Progressive Architecture (P/A) Awards. One of the foremost accolades for creative practice in North America, the P/A Awards recognize and celebrate innovative ongoing work, contractually scheduled to be built, whose design excellence promotes new thinking in the field of architecture.

Located at the base of a remote valley north of Beijing, the Chapel of Sound is designed in harmony with its natural surroundings, and shaped by the natural properties of sound. The project, currently under construction, was one of ten honored in this year’s Awards, where it was commended for offering a new paradigm for an opera house and “an opportunity for a sound experience that anyone can take part in.”