Yanfei Shui is founding partner and chief architect of NATURALBUILD, a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Shanghai, which he founded together with Yi-Chi Su in 2012. He is also a visiting professor at Tongji University.
At its core, NATURALBUILD— one of the most highly regarded emerging offices in China—takes the comparative study of Chinese and Western cultures, embraces the complexities and contradictions of the reality of China and initiates the resonance of various genotypes emerging from program, function, landscape, topography, materiality, form, etc.
The firm’s work has received numerous design awards and has been featured in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Shanghai West Bund Biennale and in publications such as a+u, Architectural Journal, Wallpaper, dezeen and designboom. Among their most notable completed projects are 1178 Waima Road Warehouse Renovation (Shanghai), Yushan Island Hotel (Zhejiang), J House (Shanghai) and the Soft Matter Pavilion (Shanghai).
Shui received a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Tongji University. Prior to starting his own practice, he has worked at OMA in Rotterdam.
