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Hongjian Qin

The buildings in this exhibition may never be built. They do their work anyway.

Hongjian Qin trained as an architect at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, earning both his B.Arch and M.S. He has worked at MAD Architects and UNStudio. Born in Chengdu and raised in Nairobi, he moves between cultures and disciplines with the same ease he moves between the possible and the speculative.

"I treat architecture not merely as shelter but as a seductive, expressive system. Functional machines and complex systems are deliberately elevated into tectonic and ornamental forms, blurring the boundary between utility and aesthetics. Invisible systems become spatial, tangible, and symbolic."

His work holds opposites together. What we shape and what shapes us. Abundance and restraint. Force and stillness. Permanence and change. The work does not choose between them. It lets them coexist.

What you are seeing is speculative. The structures here record something real about the moment we are living in. Our anxieties. Our ambitions. Our rituals of consumption. Architecture as cultural artifact. Architecture as a way of asking what comes next.

The images draw from film and fashion as much as from architectural practice. Surfaces are worked until they hum. Details that would normally disappear into the infrastructure of a building are brought forward and given weight. The result is a body of work that feels operative and strange at once. Familiar and not. Reading it takes time, and time is what the work reveals.

Qin received the SCI-Arc Merit Thesis Award in 2020. His work has been published on Archinect and exhibited at the SCI-Arc Spring Show.

Jun 5th -26th 2026 | Reception: Sun Jun 21st 2-4pm