HAAU is a multidisciplinary architectural practice working across contexts, scales, and geographies, between design, research, and participatory practices.
HAAU (酵) : means fermentation in Cantonese, a slow, relational process of transforming matter.
This is how we approach architecture, not as an act of production, but as a practice attuned to the relations between the built and the living, the social and the ecological, the functional and the sensory.
Systemic inquiry is at the core of our process. We read territories as living systems, making visible the ecological, social, and technological forces that shape how people inhabit the world. From urban biodiversity to extractive infrastructures, we engage with what is often invisible: the relations, thresholds, and transformations that precede and outlast any building. Through storytelling and research-based methodologies, our projects seek to embrace the complexity of lived experiences rather than simplify them.
This thinking takes form across architecture, landscape, exhibitions, scenography, and material experimentation, each operating at a different scale of inquiry.
In 2025, HAAU was awarded the Planetary Transition research fellowship, exploring planetary-scale energy challenges at the intersection of architectural practice, social sciences, and geosciences, in collaboration with the Research Institute for Sustainability and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Germany. Alongside practice, HAAU teaches at École Spéciale d'Architecture, LISAA, and the post-master programme Design by Data, engaging future generations in shaping tomorrow's design narratives.
In the Anthropocene era, we consider architecture not as a fixed discipline but as a hybrid1 practice, one that generates new forms of action where spatial, ecological, and social questions converge.
1. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern