Wenchian Shi

Partner, Architect and Urban Planner, Wenchian Shi (CH) is the driving force behind MVRDV’s Asia Studio. Shi joined MVRDV in 2004 and became a Project Leader in 2008 overseeing the office’s broad body of work in China, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore, and Partner in 2016. Before MVRDV, Wenchian worked at OMA, contributing to the design of the highly acclaimed CCTV Headquarters in Beijing.

With this extensive experience, and an international education including a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Shanghai Tongji University, and a master’s degree in Urban Planning from TU Delft, Shi excels at international collaborations with clients and consultants in both Asia and Europe. She has worked at all scales of architecture and urban planning including housing, offices, retail, and cultural institutions. Projects she has lead partnering next to founder Winy Maas include the Tianjin Binhai Library - part of a larger masterplan to provide a cultural district for Tianjin, China, the Seoullo 7017 Skygarden – a true plant village realised on a former inner city highway in Seoul, Korea- and Tainan Spring – the transformation of a former city-centre shopping mall into an urban lagoon in Tainan, Taiwan. She leads the teams and projects from MVRDV HQ in Rotterdam as well as the satellite studio in Shanghai, China, and is strongly attached to the office’s mission to not exclude anyone or anything and introducing gender equality also in our branch in Shanghai. She leads by herself the Asian Studio at the Rotterdam HQ with two cells for Taiwan and Korea and keeps growing the Shanghai branch, now good for a sixth of MVRDVs total staff (by itself larger than the MVRDV she once joined). Considering all this, we believe Wenchian Shi to be the outspoken candidate to win the Spotlight Award at the WAN Female Frontier Awards.