Before contributing to public architecture and award-winning international projects in New York, architect Qianhe Fan built his foundation at SIDD, a leading Shanghai-based design office known for its complex, territorial-scale developments across China. There, Fan was not an observer but a project architect—shaping large-scale cultural and ecological work with a depth of responsibility uncommon among early-career designers. His time at SIDD instilled a design discipline grounded in planning logic, coordination fluency, and architectural restraint—all of which directly inform his practice today.
Fan began working at SIDD during his final academic year, while living in China and continuing his academic pursuits remotely due to COVID-related disruptions. This arrangement allowed him to take on a full workload while continuing his studies—an experience that reinforced his ability to manage complex demands efficiently.
At SIDD, Fan contributed significantly to several of the firm’s most high-profile projects. Among them, the Waterfront Ecological Aesthetics Testbed in Guiyang—a 23,000-square-meter riverfront development—transformed a disused stretch of industrial land into a publicly accessible landscape integrating pedestrian infrastructure, low-rise pavilions, and ecological buffers. Fan played a lead role in site planning, sectional development, and consultant coordination. His ability to maintain conceptual clarity across multiple disciplines helped advance the project from diagram to deliverables.
Equally ambitious was Redberry Valley, a 90,000-square-meter rural tourism complex in Hefei, focused on ecological education, leisure, and local agricultural integration. The masterplan combined guest villas, event halls, exhibition greenhouses, and walking trails within a loosely gridded landscape framework. Fan contributed across all design phases, developing building typologies, modular massing studies, and phasing strategies. He also handled architectural detailing for several structures, translating schematic forms into construction-ready logic.
Fan also worked on the China Great Canals Museum (Third Hall) in Yangzhou, a major cultural facility tied to China’s national heritage corridor. The 10,000-square-meter museum required a careful negotiation between curatorial ambition and functional layout. Fan developed circulation diagrams, exhibition zoning strategies, and early design studies that helped establish the spatial groundwork for the proposal. Working directly with content developers and consultants, he was central to resolving how architectural form could support nonlinear historical storytelling.
What distinguished Fan at SIDD was not just design talent, but fluency across all layers of project delivery. He could move from early narrative frameworks to precise material articulation without losing coherence. At a firm where most teams were divided between planning and architecture, Fan worked across both—leading design at the scale of districts and buildings alike.
That experience translated directly to his current work in New York at OBRA Architects, where Fan has contributed to projects with similarly layered demands: modular pavilions, public buildings, and infrastructure-inflected community spaces. His design for the Cheonggyecheon Connectivity Pavilion in Seoul—now in development—draws from lessons first encountered in Guiyang: modularity as both construction method and spatial language. His role in Van Dyke Community Center and the Brownsville Boxing Club, commissioned by the NYC Housing Authority, echoes his earlier experience navigating complex programming, code, and agency review.
At both SIDD and OBRA, Fan has consistently worked in contexts where architecture is required to do more than look good—it must perform across logistical, cultural, and spatial registers. The precision and scale he managed early on in China gave him the tools to operate in New York’s fragmented, regulatory-heavy public sector without losing architectural clarity.
In a global profession often dominated by aesthetic gestures or inflated branding, Qianhe Fan’s trajectory offers something else: a grounded, system-minded architecture rooted in real constraints and complex sites. The projects he helped shape at SIDD remain standing examples of this ethos, and his current work carries those lessons forward—translated into a new cultural and urban landscape, but guided by the same architectural rigor.
