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Design with Sensibility | Practice with Honor

We consider it an honor to be entrusted by our clients to bring their projects into reality. Each project is unique and is designed with creativity and innovation as guiding principles. Our name is derived from the literary work by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. In the book, the City of Andria is described as a city designed according to the spirit of the times - interdependant and always evolving.

Si Dang, AIA (principal) graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Houston College of Architecture in 1998. In 1999 he co-founded Preston Workshop, an art, architecture and industrial design collaborative focusing on site-specific art installations, contemporary crafts, and engaging the public in the creative arts environment. His career led him to become a Senior Associate at Morris Architects, one of the premiere design firms in Houston, where he spent over 5 years working on prominent projects such as Moody Gardens, Four Seasons Restaurant Expansion, and Houston Baptist University Cultural Arts Center. He left Morris and founded Andria Design in 2005 as an interior design/build company, which evolved into a full-service architecture firm focusing on hospitality design. His hobbies include furniture design and fabrication. His affinity for creative arts led him to take the position of vice president of Hive-Houston, a visionary creative arts community planned to be built in Houston in collaboration with artist Nestor Topchy. Si and his wife Nancy live inside the loop where they enjoy the vibrant cultural amenities unique to the city of Houston.

Jyh-Chau Lin, LEED AP (Design Director-International Studio)Chau, with the honor of receiving the Gerald D. Hines Scholarship to attend graduate studies at the University of Houston, received a Merit Design Award in a Graduate Student design competition and graduated with a Master of Architecture degree in May 2005. He soon began working as Chief Designer at EDI Architecture, beginning in Houston and moving to their New York City office in the short span of four years. Chau has the unique ability to design using both hand sketches and computer graphics. He has the sensibility and experience to design both architecture and interiors in a progressive pattern that allows efficient transition to construction documentation. In July 2006, he was awarded 1st Place in a Rice Design Alliance Partners Sustainability design charrette.

Chau gained ten years of professional experience in interiors & architecture working in his home country Taiwan prior to traveling to the United States where his scholastic achievements included painting, design and photography. His international journey has poised him to be at the forefront of a global movement towards sustainable design using innovative construction methods and planning concepts. His ability to communicate in Chines and English along with his immersion in both Eastern and Western cultures gives him the unique sensibilities to bridge civilizations.

In 2009, Chau joined Andria Design and spearheaded the opening of the firm’s International Studio in Dalian City, China where he cooperates with Pioneer Architecture Design firm, the largest private architecture firm in Dalian City. His portfolio is a diverse mix of interiors & architecture projects including high-rise residential, high-rise office buildings and 5-star Hotel projects located throughout Taiwan, the United States, Angola, and China.

Excerpt from Invisible Cities

Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city's calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other.

Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city's life flows calmly like the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice. In praising Andria's citizens for their productive industry and their spiritual ease, I was led to say: I can well understand how you, feeling yourselves part of an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous clockwork, take care not to make the slightest change in your city and your habits. Andria is the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in time.

They looked at one another dumbfounded. "But why? Whoever said such a thing?" And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a bamboo grove, a shadow-theater under construction in the place of the municipal kennels, now moved to the pavilions of the former lazaretto, abolished when the last plague victims were cured, and--just inaugurated--a river port, a statue of Thales, a toboggan slide.

"And these innovations do not disturb your city's astral rhythm?" I asked.

"Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly, " they answered, "that any change in Andria involves some novelty among the stars."

The astronomers, after each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova's explosion, or a remote point in the firmament's change of color from orange to yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way. Each change implies a sequence of other changes, in Andria as among the stars: the city and the sky never remain the same.

As for the character of Andria's inhabitants, two virtues are worth mentioning: self-confidence and prudence.

…Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky's pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.