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Y O U R E Y E S O N L Y
How Chris Precht Is Using Architecture to Re-imagine
Reality — One Radical Idea At A Time.
• Precht at work on his first project in Bali.
The Alchemist
THERE’S a road in the Austrian Alps that leads
somewhere unexpected. It twists through pine forests,
skirts the edge of impossibly green meadows, and
finally arrives at a studio that looks less like an office
and more like a door into the future. Inside, sketches
sprawl across wooden desks, models of bamboo
towers sit beside ceramics, and a pair of boots—mud-
caked from a morning walk—rests by the door. This is
the domain of Chris Precht, one of the most original
architects of our time.
In
an
era
where
buildings
have
become
interchangeable—glassy, square, generic, utterly
forgettable—Precht is the rare mind who sees
architecture not as an industry, but as an art form.
His work is playful, poetic, deeply ecological, and
slightly rebellious. That’s probably why, the deeper
you dive into his work, the more you start to
wonder—should he be called The Alchemist?
But the best alchemists never unveil their secrets too
quickly.
The Architect Who Walked Away
It’s not hard to picture Precht in a very different
setting—corner office, city skyline, a pipeline of high-
rise projects keeping him busy from dawn till dusk. He
could have had that life. For a while, he almost did. His
first studio, Penda, launched in Beijing in 2013, was an
instant success. The projects were ambitious, clients
lined up, and the pace was relentless. But something
felt off.
“Architecture started feeling like a product, not a craft,”
Precht says. “I didn’t want to spend my career designing
things I didn’t believe in.”
So, in 2017, he did what few would dare. He left. He and
his wife, Fei, moved their studio to the mountains of
Austria, to a place with no traffic, no skyscrapers, no
industry buzz—just air, trees, and time. They renamed
their practice Studio Precht, stripping away the
formality of corporate architecture in favor of something
personal, something raw.
“We wanted to build with honesty,” he says. “To make
things that feel real.”
Bamboo Towers and the Art of the Impossible
Step inside Precht’s world, and you realize that real
doesn’t mean boring. His buildings curve, coil, and rise
like something from a Miyazaki dreamscape. Towers
wrapped in vegetation, villages made of modular
timber, structures that look grown rather than built.
His material of choice? Bamboo—nature’s carbon-
sequestering, fast-growing, absurdly strong alternative
to steel.