Na Shen

Being recognized as a Gold Winner by the MUSE Design Awards gives me great confidence. It affirms that the path I’m pursuing—imaginative yet responsible architecture—truly matters, and it motivates me to keep creating work that is both visionary and practically sustainable.

As the solo founder of Atelier Lune, I focus on sustainable design strategies that benefit both people and the planet. This recognition enhances my credibility, sparks new conversations around micro-living concepts and climate-positive design, and, hopefully, opens doors to collaborate with others who share these values.

Design, for me, is an iterative process of experimentation—exploring massing, program, layout, color, materials, and environmental response—until the solution feels inevitable. In NESTSHIP, I tested numerous variations to balance structure, daylight, ventilation, and interior efficiency, ultimately selecting the options that achieved the best harmony among them.

For NESTSHIP, the octahedron form emerged from pairing a pyramid with its inverted counterpart—day and night, positive and negative, gravity and anti-gravity—then refining the idea through the lens of the Five Platonic Solids, where the octahedron is inherently associated with air. This duality—light yet grounded—inspired a design that minimizes land impact while maximizing environmental performance.

Instinctive inspiration comes quickly and often unexpectedly; the real design lies in patient refinement. Most of the process involves testing an idea against the site, climate, code, budget, structure, and craft—and then editing until only what truly matters remains. It’s one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent effort devoted to refining the idea.

My approach is to translate vision into clear, testable principles—performance targets, spatial priorities, and cost parameters. Even with NESTSHIP’s futuristic form, I grounded the concept in seismic strategy, structural logic, MEP routing, water and sewer systems, solar and passive strategies, and constructability. Architecture lives in the real world, not the metaverse; uniting idea and reality into one coherent solution is the shared responsibility of both the designer and the client.

The biggest challenges lay in the details and mechanics: stabilizing a central-pier structure, panelizing non-orthogonal surfaces, and integrating MEP systems without compromising the project’s aesthetics. The core difficulty was buildability—ensuring that the geometry, structure, and service routes could be executed exactly as designed. Conceptual ideas must ultimately stand up to the realities of structure, coordination, and construction.

I love to travel and explore new experiences. I’ve had the opportunity to work and live across the United States, Europe, and Asia, gaining insight into how different cultures approach life and the arts. So far, I’ve visited 15 countries. Changing environments—whether cities or nature, museums or mountains—refreshes my perspective and broadens my creative references. Every scene, real or surreal, rekindles my sense of imagination and sparks new ideas.

Sometimes I feel deeply touched by a piece of music or a painting, such as epic music or impressionistic paintings. I have the same feeling when I encounter a work of architecture. It reminds me of Louis Kahn’s quote: “A city should be a place where a little boy walking through its streets can sense what he someday would like to be.” I realized these feelings relate to poetic images (in Chinese, epic + impressionistic = poetic image). So what should poetic images look like? Space is not only for programs or functions; it is for human emotions and memories. That forms my design philosophy.

I would say: see much, travel much, experience much. A cathedral in Paris might inspire you to design a vault; the rising smoke of Yellowstone could spark the idea for a fountain; a Bauhaus or Kandinsky painting might lead you to design a façade. You never know when—or where—the next inspiration that could change you, or even the world, will appear.

Zaha Hadid remains my greatest architectural inspiration. I would love to collaborate with her experimental spirit—perhaps on a Mars habitation project—pushing structural logic, material performance, and human experience responsibly beyond Earth.

What kind of designer do you hope to be remembered as? An inspiring designer who expresses ideas fully and bridges utopia and reality—creating a poetic future that helps people live lightly on the planet.