X.C STUDIO
X.C STUDIO
An architect who draws cities, designs buildings and makes objects, and treats the three as one practice.
Cultural and civic buildings, mostly unbuilt and competition-led, that join a site's history to what it could become. Form comes from the section and the ground: a museum that looks into its excavation, a community centre whose roof folds. Sustainability is treated as a design question, not a checklist.
Space, technology and craft handled together: a building, the furniture in it, the object on the table and the image that explains them, by the same hand. Research projects (Hexa-Net, Machina Hub, Skinfit) test how systems and people share a grid.
Drawing series built by layering: plans, perspectives and photographs cut and recomposed until a city reads as one picture. Shown at the Carrousel du Louvre, the CICA Museum and the Kyoto Horizon exhibition; screened at the Architecture and Design Film Festival; published on silk.
Parametric and computational modelling; physical and digital fabrication; photorealistic visualisation; generative image tools used as sketching partners, never as the final hand; film editing and scoring; and hand-built websites and plug-ins. Every project is documented in drawings before it is rendered.
X.C STUDIO was founded in New York in 2020 by Xuechen Chen, an architect trained at Pratt Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. It works between architecture, images and objects: unbuilt museums and community buildings; drawing series and installations shown from the Carrousel du Louvre to the CICA Museum in Korea; furniture and printed editions.
The drawings started it. The Urban Unfold series took three cities apart, the way a film is cut, and put them back together; the studio's film of New York was screened at the Architecture and Design Film Festival, and the drawings were later published as silk editions. The buildings came from the same way of seeing: the Museum of Uncertainty sits over an excavation and looks into it; the Folding Boat folds its roof like paper.
The mark is the name. X: two shapes meeting at a point. C: a square opened along its diagonal.
Concept and competition design, visualisation, and the drawings that make a project legible. Museums, cultural buildings, interiors.
Drawing series, digital art and installations, from a single commissioned piece to a body of work for exhibition or print.
Small, fast sites built by hand, and plug-ins for design software. Design and build in one pair of hands.
Objects and printed editions, from first sketch to the factory. X.C STUDIO is a contracted designer for ARKVEIL Editions.