Hiroshi Okamoto - OLI Architecture PLLC

Our guest is Hiroshi Okamoto, co-founder together with Bing Lin, of OLI Architecture PLLC, a New York-based practice with offices in Shanghai and Paris, whose expertise consists of civic and cultural structures, education, healthcare, and residential international design. Their approach, attentive to create unique buildings merged with the cultural environment of the site, focuses on contextual studies using physical, digital, and parametric models. Hiroshi will share his experience, over a decade, spent working alongside I. M. Pei, as Site Representative and Project Architect, following many important projects as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha and the Chapel at Miho Institute of Aesthetics in Shigaraki, Japan. He touches some significant moments of his experiential path, until, once established his own practice, he will realize important works, as the Art Museum for the local-born Chinese writer and painter, Mu Xin. Located in the historic water town of Wuzhen, the complex, a ’delicate lakeside addition’, embodies an enticing presence, representing a vibrant living portrait of the artist. Again in Wuzhen, another excellent example of Okamoto’s respectful, sensible intervention: the North Zone Silk Factory finds a new life becoming a fascinating container of International Contemporary Art, contributing to a new perspective about globalism and localism. Several considerations are reserved to the relation between architecture and art/sculpture, due to the long collaboration between the architect and Richard Serra, leading to the most recent LX Cross Pavilion, attentively studied to the smallest details for hosting one of the famous sculptures, becoming an “art piece” itself.