Weitao Li

Founder of We Live Architects / Chongqing, China

About

Weitao Li is someone who is difficult to describe with the word “architect” alone. He is drawn to new ideas and willing to question familiar rules, but he does not believe in being avant-garde for its own sake. What matters more to him is sincerity: why a building is here, how people will use it, and whether it truly belongs to the life around it. After returning from London to Chongqing, he gradually developed what he calls an approach of “avant-garde and simplicity”: thinking far ahead, but working in a grounded way. He might build an almost spiritual concrete structure in a sorghum field, then quietly ask nearby residents, “Do you think this building is strange?” If they say they do not quite understand it but they like it, that is enough for him. Over the years, he has become less concerned with what architecture is trying to “say” and more with whether the work itself has been done well. In Chongqing’s community renewal projects, he and his team organize events, bring in businesses, and work through operational problems, because if a space is finished but no one comes, its beauty means little. After Jiangling Teahouse was completed, he said that people there are not really looking at the architecture all the time; they are looking at one another, and at life. For him, that may be the moment when a space truly becomes alive.

Practice

Founder of We Live Architects

Education

The Bartlett, UCL

Professional qualification

RIBA Chartered Architect

Architecture

Sponsor brief

Activity

Avant-garde and simplicity: a design attitude grounded in imagination, originality, and responsibility, moving between what is reasonable and what is not yet allowed.

Designing2017China

Avant-Garde and Simplicity

We Live Architects describes its work through two ideas that may seem opposed: avant-garde and simplicity. Imagination is where a project begins, but originality is not enough on its own. The studio sees responsibility and careful execution as equally important, carrying an idea all the way from its first gesture to the finished space. Its work grows from the environment and the time in which it exists, often moving along the line between what feels reasonable and what has not yet been allowed. Rather than following what is fashionable, the studio is drawn to conditions that may be imperfect but interesting, and to ideas that may not be popular but feel sincere. Through form, morphology, and concept, it looks at the relationships between people and their environment, society, and themselves, using space to create unfamiliar behaviors and experiences and to make room for new ways of thinking.