CU Office, founded by CHE Fei and ZHANG Xuefeng in Beijing in 2007, has long been committed to studying the development of urban and rural social spaces in China, and has proposed targeted architectural theories and strategies for the evolution of urban and rural space, and has carried out architectural practice based on this. Their practice operates on two levels: generality and specificity. In each project, they strive to develop a general architectural prototype, principle, or theory to think about and answer the problems facing the current development of urban and rural social space. At the same time, every project is a site- and time-specific intervention. This specificity manifests in their treatment of the environment as the subject of the concrete form of time and space, leading to their practice strategy of “Environmental Architecture”. As a result, each of their architectural practice project possesses unique and irreplicable qualities.
The practice of CU Office spans a wide range of types including urban plan, architecture, renovation, interior, landscape, and product design etc., among which the key areas include: urban renewal, cultural architecture, protection and renewal of historical buildings, and campus planning.
Fei Che
(professor and dean of BIFT school of art & design, Architect and Co-Founder of CU Office, Chartered architect by Royal Institute of British)
Professor Fei Che is an architect with more than 15 years of professional experience in design and architectural education. He received a PhD in urban theory from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, Germany, and a master's degree in architecture from Anhalt university, Germany. He is architect and Co-Founder of CU Office. The office focuses on architectural practice in transforming social space and finishing a series of architectural and urban projects on China's urbanization, urban renewal and rural revitalization during last 15 years. His designs and creations focus on social development and he is famous for his environmental architecture. As a scholar on urbanism and architecture, Fei Che had books pubilshed regularly: Introversion and Extroversion of Space (2019), The Socio-spatial Transition of Beijing–A Fundamental Concept of City Spaceology (2013) and Concussion(2009). He currently teaches at Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology and serves as the dean of the School of Art and Design. He has given lectures and workshops at various universities around the world. His work is regularly exhibited in important international architecture and art museums, and in 2021 it was exhibited at the 17th International Architecture Biennale in Venice.
Xuefeng Zhang
ZHANG Xuefeng is Co-Founder of CU Office and has an experience of 21 years as architect and landscape architect. After gaining her master degree of landscape architecture in Germany, She worked in a German Landscape Architecture office for years and was registered landscape architect in Germany，finishing different kinds of projects, such as China National Museum Courtyard, Jincheng Children Park. She has served as a third-party expert consultant for the Asian Development Bank participating in a number of urban green ecological transformation projects in China.
With a background of landscape architecture, ZHANG Xuefeng contributes a different perspective to the design process and proposals in CU Office making every project as a integrated design which has led to the gradual formation of the "environmental architecture" practice strategy of CU Office.
