Rome – The Accademia Nazionale di San Luca becomes the stage for a new international project: “Come Aperto dal Cielo: New Landscapes in Chinese Architecture.” An unprecedented exploration of the new languages of contemporary China.
Conceived and produced by the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and Palatina Cultural Group, the project unfolds through a series of encounters between the end of 2026 and the beginning of 2027, dedicated to the leading figures of contemporary Chinese architecture through a lectio magistralis and a “spatial self-portrait”: a solo exhibition conceived by each architect as an account of their own journey.
The new languages that are being developed in China are placed in dialogue with certain experiences in Italian architecture, particularly around the themes of the city-countryside relationship, landscape and urban regeneration. Two millennia-old traditions meet in a venue that for centuries trained some of the most important architects in Western history. This lends the initiative a particular symbolic value: an encounter between East and West, hosted at the heart of Italian architectural culture, revealing striking affinities in the way both traditions approach the transformation of the contemporary landscape.
The title of the encounters, “Come Aperto dal Cielo” (“As If Opened by the Sky”), evokes the first treatise on garden design from the Ming era, the Yuanye, and its central theoretical principle: the classical Chinese garden does not pretend to be nature, it knows itself to be artifice, yet it works so that this artifice becomes unrecognisable as such to those who move through it. Read in a contemporary light, this principle continues today to guide and inspire the research of China’s greatest architects.
The initiative’s first appointment will see the architect Xu Tiantian take centre stage, founder of the studio DnA_Design and Architecture and one of the most authoritative voices on the Chinese architectural scene. Over the years, Xu Tiantian has developed a method she herself calls “architectural acupuncture”: a series of targeted, small-scale interventions capable of triggering processes of economic and social regeneration in rural areas of China. This method has been identified by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) as a global model for integrating urban and rural contexts.
A graduate of Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1997, she went on to earn a master’s degree in urban design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked for a period at OMA, in the Netherlands, before returning to China. In 2004, she founded DnA Design and Architecture in Beijing. Since 2014, she has worked continuously in the rural areas of Songyang: not a single manifesto building, but a network of more than twenty small-scale interventions (converted artisan workshops, theatres, bridges, schools) spread across four hundred villages and 1,400 square kilometres. Since 2020, she has extended the same method to Fujian, in the areas of the UNESCO site protecting the Tulou, the circular rammed-earth fortresses of the Hakka people.
International recognition of the quality of her work has not been long in coming: between 2022 and 2026 she received a series of international awards that measure the social impact of her work ahead of its formal quality: the Swiss Architectural Award in 2022, her appointment as Davenport Visiting Professor at Yale that same year, her entry into the teaching staff of the Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio, the Kunstpreis Berlin and the Marcus Prize in 2023, and her election to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2024. On 10 March 2025, she received the Wolf Prize for Architecture, the first ever awarded to a Chinese woman architect, “for architecture that has transformed villages throughout China economically, socially and culturally.” In 2026, she received the Prix Charlotte Perriand, joining the same lineage as Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Jeanne Gang and Frida Escobedo. The German Design Council has most recently named Xu Tiantian and DnA_Design and Architecture “Architects of the Year” at the ICONIC AWARDS 2026: the award ceremony is scheduled for 6 October 2026 at BMW Welt in Munich, with a lectio delivered by Xu Tiantian herself.
In Rome, Arch. Xu Tiantian will present her work through a lectio magistralis and a self-portrait exhibition on the theme of “micro-interventions, macro-impact in villages,” illustrating the adaptive reuse project of the Tulou, traditional buildings of Fujian province. The initiative, developed in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and DnA_Design and Architecture, is under the patronage of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Italy.
The lectio magistralis and the opening of Xu Tiantian’s exhibition will take place at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca on 1 October 2026. The exhibition will be open to the public from 2 to 24 October 2026.