RE: FERMENTATION

Ming Chen is a Los Angeles-based architectural designer at AUX Architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Her work spans architectural practice, research, and design competitions, with interests in adaptive reuse, sustainable housing, ecological systems, and bio-based materials. She has also contributed to research on biomaterials and deployable structures at the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture. Her practice connects environmental performance, material experimentation, and human experience across scales.

Hedi Mao is a Los Angeles-based architectural designer with a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Hedi’s design practice and research primarily focus on the intersection of adaptive reuse, sustainability, and advanced building technology. By rethinking existing structures through the lens of emerging spatial technologies, Hedi investigates how we can sustainably reprogram our built environment. Their work explores how intelligent systems and innovative digital methodologies can breathe new life into obsolete physical spaces, constantly negotiating the boundary between technological thought and material reality.

Our collaborative practice operates between technological method and material consequence. Across adaptive reuse, sustainable design, and computational fabrication, we investigate how underused structures acquire new ecological and sensory lives. We read existing buildings not merely as forms, but as thermal mass, filtered light, acoustic change, and tactile resistance. Digital tools serve this reading rather than replace it: simulation and fabrication bring us closer to material behavior, not further from it. We treat existing conditions, emerging technology, and embodied experience as mutually catalytic—each provoking the others into spatial forms none would reach alone.