🗺️ From March 19 to 22, Design Shanghai 2026, Asia’s most influential international design event, was held at Shanghai Exhibition Center. The event’s theme, “Beyond Sustainability: Designing with Nature”, brought together over 500 design brands from more than 20 countries and regions, along with design leaders and industry experts, to explore how design can engage with the development of future societies.

▪️ Fanhao Meng, co-founder and principal architect of line+studio, was invited to attend the opening forum of the Design Shanghai Global Design Conference and deliver the keynote “Shanshui Form”. The forum was opened by Aidan Walker, Director of the Design Shanghai Forum, and featured international guests including Hu Li (co-founder of OPEN Architecture), Chris Lefteri (founder of Chris Lefteri Design), and Yu Ohashi (President of Zaha Hadid Architects China), who shared insights and discussed multi-dimensional topics. As a core forum of Design Shanghai, it has long gathered practitioners and researchers from architecture, product, interior, and cross-disciplinary fields, establishing a sustained exchange platform in the Asian design context.

▫️ In his presentation, Fanhao Meng explored how contemporary architecture responds to the relationship between nature and human intervention within China’s Shanshui context through three projects of different scales. He emphasized an architectural approach inspired by Chinese landscape philosophy: treating nature as a continuously existing whole rather than as something to be replaced or dominated. Architecture, in this process, intervenes subtly, participating in the organization of space and formation of order, and reconstructs the relationship between the natural and the artificial in a contemporary construction context.

▫️ This perspective resonates with the conference’s “Beyond Sustainability: Designing with Nature” theme—shifting from controlling single environmental metrics to promoting ecosystem regeneration and evolution through design interventions, further expanding the methods and possibilities of architectural design in environmental issues.

▫️ As an important platform connecting global design resources with the Chinese context, Design Shanghai continues to foster exchanges and translations between different cultures and approaches. In this open discussion, line+studio also actively responded with local practice experience, continuously engaging in the exploration of the relationships among nature, technology, and humans in contemporary design.