Architect Yichun Liu on building brutalist structures with time and memory

This phenomenon, as Liu describes, is the spiritual dimension of design. To him, a sense of place is not necessarily achieved through the decorative or the ornamental alone. It emerges through proportion, texture and chiaroscuro; as well as through domains that heighten awareness of one’s surroundings. The feeling of well-being, he believes, comes from inhabiting a spatial field that acknowledges both presence and passage.

Few architects speak of passage as Liu does. For him, it is both material and measure, a silent collaborator that shapes form as surely as concrete or steel. He cites the Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, whose concept of age-value celebrates the quiet beauty of decay. In Liu’s work, that brutalist beauty is tangible. Surfaces are allowed to weather, and textures carry the marks of rain and light. “Age-value,” he notes, “is the trace left by time on buildings, the memory that remains.”

When he speaks of vestiges, it is with affection rather than nostalgia. To him, these brutalist remnants represent the ultimate collaboration between human intention and natural process, the inflexion point where edifice and the environment settle into equilibrium. “A ruin,” he reflects, “is the final dialogue between structure and nature, the moment when architecture becomes time itself.”

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In this philosophy, deterioration is not loss but continuity. Weathering, corrosion and erosion become acts of transformation. Each surface records the conditions of its existence, the humidity of the river air, the grit of the city’s dust, the patina of human touch. This sensitivity to temporality gives Liu’s buildings their distinctive serenity that comes from revealing the layers of their making.

The Huangpu River is central to Liu’s imagination. Many of his projects, such as the Long Museum West Bund and the Yangpu Riverside Passage, stand along its banks. Once a working artery for Shanghai’s factories, the water has evolved into something of a cultural spine for the city. “For me,” Liu says, “this carries the concept of time on a city scale.”

Before 2010, it was defined by transportation and production, but it has since transformed into a landscape of leisure and art. Liu’s framework traces this rhythm. Where smokestacks once stood, his concrete vaults and preserved walls act as anchors of continuity. They remind the city of its layered identity, bridging the mechanical past and the meditative present and leaving order for a future worth anticipating. Standing inside one of his riverside projects, one senses the beauty and contrast between the movement from the current of the river beyond and an inner stillness shaped by it.

For Liu, these foundations carry both technical and emotional charge. In his lauded Long Museum, the building’s dramatic umbrella vaults are cast from concrete poured into the forms of the coal hoppers that once occupied the site. This seems to display his desire to seek an order that emerged naturally from within, as he explains, “not rooms or walls.”

This results in works where engineering and atmosphere are inseparable. The massive concrete shells rise like inverted funnels, filtering daylight through their curved edges. Liu believes that this transcends cultural boundaries. “Even without understanding its history,” he says, “people can feel something universal in its form.” This meeting of logic and intuition reveals Liu’s deeper intent; where others would hide the load-bearing elements, he reveals them to allow honesty of material and proportion to evoke trust.

In an age obsessed with façades, Liu finds grace in the raw honesty of what holds things up. Across his brutalist projects, Liu favours materials that age well, such as concrete, brick, tile and steel, each chosen for its quiet record of what endures. His reuse of old industrial components is not merely sustainable but emotional.

At the Yangpu Riverside Passage, a weathered concrete wall was kept intact, its rough surface left to absorb the new. Rubble from demolition sites was folded back into the landscape, allowing the site’s story to remain visible.

“Materials carry feeling,” Liu says. “They connect directly with the body.” Texture, to him, is conversation; where hand meets surface, and the present acknowledges its origins. He prefers to work at a human scale, shaping thresholds, edges and planes that awaken tactile awareness. Even the unseen, he insists, behaves like a material. It reveals depth, marks the hours and traces the contours of space. “Light is the eye of architecture,” he says. “It shows where the air moves, where time flows.” In his buildings, light becomes a kind of measure—of atmosphere, of emotion, of the day itself.

When asked how he balances the pull between nature and history, Liu smiles. “It depends on the site,” he says simply. In places where cultural heritage runs deep, he lets history lead; in those surrounded by landscape, he lets nature guide the design. But the two, he insists, are never separate. Even in natural environments, tradition shapes our perception of the land; even in urban ones, nature returns through the years and decay. In every case, his oeuvre adheres to Liu’s core belief: it must listen before it speaks.

Shanghai, like many Asian metropolises, changes at a breakneck pace. Towers rise, neighbourhoods vanish, entire skylines shift within a decade. Against this backdrop, Liu’s decision to preserve fragments of the old industrial city feels radical. “Rapid development means everything changes,” he says. “When there is so much change, what remains unchanged gives people a sense of stability.”

This contentment to impermanence and change is, in many ways, Liu’s definition of wellbeing. To live well, he suggests, is to live with awareness, to recognise that comfort comes from living in harmony with change, instead of denying it.

Though Yichun Liu’s practice is rooted in large cultural and urban projects, his ideas about continuity extend naturally into the home. In domestic life, he believes, calm arises not from conformity but from composition. In a home, he says, furniture becomes the embodiment of the exterior. Many contemporary interiors pursue unity through uniformity or coordination, but Liu prefers the harmony found in diversity, collecting pieces from different eras and regions, each an artefact from a separate journey, brought together to form a new whole. The contrast between old and new, he believes, brings warmth and depth, creating homes that feel lived-in rather than arranged.

Looking across Liu’s body of work, a pattern emerges: each project begins with what is already there. The process is less about invention than dialogue. Whether transforming a riverside silo into an art centre or reimagining a waterworks as a bookstore, he treats creation as a continuous act of translation; he carries what came before into form, not to recall it, but to begin again.

This quiet philosophy has earned Atelier Deshaus recognition far beyond China, yet Liu remains focused on the everyday meaning of his work. “Architecture”, he once said in a lecture, “exists between people and the world.” That threshold, that zone of relation, is where his vision comes into focus.

In an age of almost exponential acceleration, his buildings remind us that to live well is to dwell better; to inhabit worlds that respect what endures even as they embrace what evolves. They ask us to slow down, to look closely, to see how life settles into materials. And in that noticing, we may perhaps find the calm that modern life so often forgets.

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