TAO

TAO (TRACE ARCHITECTURE OFFICE) was founded by Li Hua in Beijing. It is a design studio committed to architecture, urban, landscape, Interior, and furniture design. TAO is critical at architecture as an obsession to fancy forms in the context of media based globalized consumerism and becoming either fashions or dogmas. We are interested in exploring ontological and essential meaning of space and tectonics in architecture, and concerned with its social and environmental impacts. The subjects such us sense of place, response to climate, material and construction method, efficient use of resource, are explored in each TAO project with its specific context.

Space
Space is a memory, discovery and inspiration. It is definitely not just a rational term defining functions. Space is perhaps most powerful aspect in architecture which can challenge our unconsciousness to our existence condition. Inspiring space can ask us questions: where you are? How you want to exist? So to create spaces which can provoke our curiosity and doubts is the most profound mission for architecture.

Tectonics
The construction is the essential means of realizing architecture. Thus, architecture is not just abstract but physical and material. The tectonics should obey an order following laws of nature, instead of arbitrariness relying on technologies. In this, there are three things important: 1. Authenticity----a quality which resists the dislocation of meaning. It reveals the essence of things; 2. Clarity----a desire of expression of true logic in structural and material although it may not be completely achieved visually; 3. Here and now—--a respect to “gravity” of our existence in sense of place and time. Architecture belongs to specific site and context in both environmental and cultural sense, we should work with limits and discover the solution with a creative mind.

Feeling/Thinking
Beauty is not dead. Also “beauty can not be created overnight” (Kahn). Beauty is always there, waiting to be discovered by man, only the way of seeing beauty is transforming constantly. This is a belief in feelings, rather than thoughts. If thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler (Nietzsche), then we should really be suspicious to the abusing power of any concepts in name of intellect. Beauty thus exists in silence.

Time
Doing architecture, we are anticipating the future, but with our memory. Architecture is a dramatic meeting between past and future, while has to be realized by present means. Thus Architecture belongs to a time, but it can also go beyond its time. Architecture without style, without appearance, without metaphor, will last and present itself in spirit.