Chien-hua Huang is an architectural designer, researcher and artist working between London, Vienna and Taipei. His practice treats the phygital as a form of agency: real technology — reinforcement learning, machine vision and material-aware generative design — brought into the world as creative intervention in socio-cultural phenomena. The work moves across scales, from shell structures assembled out of scanned plastic waste, to a market built with the community of Guabuliga in northern Ghana, to documenting the self-built homes of displaced families near Erbil. Throughout, he pairs the realities of fabrication and construction with the speculative potential of research, participatory design and teaching. He has taught at the China Academy of Art, focusing on phygital culture in digital fabrication, and has led workshops on collaborative AI at ACADIA, eCAADe and CAADRIA. After working as an immersive developer at Arup in London, he is now co-founder and CTO of Turn-Motion in Vienna.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture (First Class Honours, RIBA Part 1) from the University of Liverpool and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, and with a Master of Architecture with distinction from the Greg Lynn Studio at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His thesis, Reform Standard, was shown as a solo exhibition at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2020 and presented at CAADRIA in 2021. The New Guabuliga Market, built with [applied] Foreign Affairs, was named Discovery of the Year at the Architecture MasterPrize 2020 and a Jury Top Pick at the BLT Built Design Awards 2021. In 2022 he received the Research Award of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Civil Engineers. His work has also been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, the Saatchi Gallery, Personal Structure in Venice in 2024, and the Taiwan contemporary art exhibition Interconnected Hearts in 2024.