PAO is an international practice with offices in Los Angeles, Beijing and Shenzhen. Founded in 2010 by James Shen, He Zhe, and Zang Feng, the firm is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice focused on work that fosters social interaction and diverse perspectives. Domus named PAO as one of the world’s best architecture firms of 2019 and Fast Company listed PAO as one of the world’s ten most innovative architecture companies in 2018. The studio’s award-winning works have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Design Society and the London Design Museum. In 2020 PAO spun off the Plugin House Company to specialize in developing low-cost prefabricated homes as products.

James Shen received his Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Product Design from California State University, Long Beach. Shen has been a Loeb Fellow at Harvard, a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and an Innovation Fellow at MIT’s China Future City Lab. He has taught at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and currently teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.

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