The Architecture of Civic Continuity guide

The Architecture of Civic Continuity

13 October 2026

Author: Adrian Welch

Throughout his work, architectural designer Zehui Li has returned to a consistent question: how can inherited structures and fragmented urban conditions become active frameworks for contemporary public life? Rather than treating preservation as the protection of an isolated object, Li approaches adaptive reuse as the reconstruction of relationships among memory, movement, and everyday civic experience. His projects span post-industrial neighborhoods, archaeological sites, waterfront infrastructure, and large-scale transportation facilities, yet they share a common ambition: to transform constraints left by history into legible systems for renewed public use.

Educated at Zhejiang University and Carnegie Mellon University, Li is an Associate at CannonDesign and a LEED AP BD+C. His work moves between professional practice and independent design research. In both settings, he is interested in how an architect establishes a formative spatial idea before programs, disciplines, and construction demands expand around it. This emphasis on frameworks rather than a fixed formal signature allows his work to operate across different scales and contexts.

Portrait of Zehui Li:

The Origins of a Civic Framework

The roots of this approach can be traced to Li’s graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. In Growing Braddock Co-Lab, he developed a cooperative civic framework for a post-industrial community shaped by vacancy, environmental degradation, unemployment, and limited access to food. Rather than proposing a self-contained landmark, Li connected knowledge exchange, food security, and shared public space as mutually reinforcing components of regeneration. Developed in close attention to the local context and the work of the Braddock Land Trust, the proposal established an early principle that continues throughout his practice: urban regeneration begins by reorganizing relationships among existing resources, community participation, and daily life. Growing Braddock Co-Lab thus became the methodological starting point for his later work, positioning architecture as an enabling framework through which existing social, spatial, and material resources can support renewed civic life.

Growing Braddock Co-Lab:

Reactivating Heritage Through Everyday Life

Li developed this position more explicitly in The Stripe of CIVITAS, an independent proposal recognized as a 2024 winner by Non-Architecture. He translated the Colosseum’s geometry into a continuous civic strip that introduced a public gallery, open park, swimming space, cafe, and areas for social gathering. The intervention reconsidered the monument not simply as a relic to be observed, but as part of a living urban landscape. Rather than reconstructing a lost historical condition, Li used new forms of access and occupation to reconnect the site with everyday public life.

The proposal articulated a distinction that has become central to Li’s work. Preservation gains contemporary meaning when historical memory can participate in everyday life. The value of an ancient structure does not reside only in its material survival; it also depends on whether citizens can continue to inhabit and reinterpret its relationship to the city. In The Stripe of CIVITAS, Li made circulation both spatial infrastructure and a method of reading the site, connecting cultural memory with ordinary urban activity.

The Stripe of CIVITAS:

From Industrial Remnant to Waterfront Civic Landscape

Li next extended this civic framework to a waterfront industrial site through the Brise-Vent Havre Harbor Museum in Le Havre, developed through LYT-X Studio, a collaborative design research group co-founded by Li. Within the studio’s collaborative framework, Li originated the project’s initial concept and led its formative massing studies. He established its civic and spatial logic by connecting the museum, elevated courtyard, retained industrial structure, and waterfront public realm into a continuous urban experience.

The proposal interprets the harbor’s existing concrete windbreak not as an obstacle to erase, but as an urban armature capable of supporting cultural and public programs. The museum rises from this inherited condition while an accessible public landscape extends across and around it, creating new visual and physical connections to the waterfront. Building on the conceptual and massing framework established by Li, the project was subsequently developed through the studio’s collaborative process, including the refinement of its roof geometry and architectural expression. Its international recognition demonstrates how a shared project can emerge from distinct but complementary forms of authorship: early civic and spatial conception, geometric and technical development, visualization, and communication.

Brise-Vent Havre Harbor Museum | Courtesy of LYT-X Studio:

Extending the Method Into Built Public Infrastructure

Li’s current professional work extends this concern with public movement and spatial legibility into the delivery of large-scale transportation infrastructure.

As an Associate at CannonDesign and a core member of the project team for the Hollywood Burbank Airport Replacement Passenger Terminal, he held a central day-to-day coordination role within the parking structure scope from design development through construction administration and substantial completion.

Li served as the primary day-to-day manager and editor of the parking structure BIM model, coordinated multidisciplinary drawing issuances, coordinated responses to key RFIs, reviewed shop drawings, and documented field conditions through substantial completion. These responsibilities have placed him at the interface of design intent, consultant coordination, fabrication, and construction. The same attention to movement, interfaces, and public legibility that informed his adaptive reuse proposals now operates within the technical constraints of a major public project. In this context, design leadership means sustaining a clear architectural and technical logic as decisions move across disciplines and project phases.

Exterior View of Hollywood Burbank Airport | Photo by Zehui Li:

A Continuing Practice of Civic Regeneration

Across these projects, Li’s practice has developed from the study of post-industrial neighborhoods and historic monuments to the coordination of contemporary public infrastructure. The scales and building types vary, but the underlying method remains consistent. Existing conditions are treated as active design material. Geometry organizes relationships rather than becoming an end in itself. Circulation is understood as civic infrastructure. New interventions are measured by their ability to make inherited places accessible, legible, and useful again.

For Li, adaptive reuse is therefore not defined solely by retaining physical fabric. It is a broader architectural practice of continuity: identifying what a place already contains, establishing a framework through which those qualities can support new forms of collective life, and carrying that framework from the initial concept toward increasingly complex forms of realization.

Comments on this guide to The Architecture of Civic Continuity article are welcome.