At Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai’s Old City, there is a pavilion where guests relax and listen to Chinese music while savoring steamed buns. “It’s a traditional Shanghai life,” says Yu Ting. “It’s hard to find that joyful atmosphere nowadays.” For the Shanghai-bred Ting, who founded Wutopia Lab in 2013 along with Min Erni, the city is a constant source of inspiration for his projects, often leading to distinctive cultural and sociological points of views.
Consider the Kaisersaal of Longevity, Kun Opera House, for which he embraced translucent screens to create a petite performing arts venue inside a sunken Shanghai courtyard. “I broke the fence between architectural design, interior design, set design, and installation,” he says.
This kind of imaginative thinking, propelled by “magical realism and uncertainty,” is what Ting wanted to showcase when launching Wutopia Lab. Grounded in concepts of “complex systems” and “antithesis,” he aims to fuse the “inheritance and development of traditional Chinese culture” with contemporary architectural design into an engaging aesthetic that champions urban progress.
Armed with an architecture degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Ting was “shocked by Mies van der Rohe’s early work,” he was hired by the East China Architecture and Design Institute (ECADI), the country’s largest state-owned design company, and simultaneously earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. By the time he was 23, he was competing with such architecture heavyweights as SOM and KPF for the design of a TV tower in Jakarta.
At Wutopia Lab that ambition is extended to a “philosophy that all design comes from the love of life,” he explains. “Hospitality is a good opportunity for us to link our thoughts and designs. Through new materials, we are trying to bring people beautiful spaces. The most rewarding part of the job is that you can make your imagination come true.”
