Academic Staff

Yinrui Xie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before joining PolyU, he held academic positions in the United Kingdom and Australia. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Tsinghua University.

 

His research examines the architectural exchanges between China and the wider world, the built environments of Chinese diasporic communities, and the application of AI in architectural historical studies. He is the author of Design as Communication: An Architectural History of Christian Universities in China (Routledge, 2025). His publications have also appeared in Architectural History, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, and Planning Perspectives.

 

His research has been funded by the British Academy, including a project he led as Principal Investigator on the architecture and place-making of Chinese temples in Britain. His current projects investigate exhibition architecture and image-making in Hong Kong, and architecture’s role in shaping China’s international presence.

 

He is developing AI-assisted approaches to architectural history, with a particular focus on the visual analysis of buildings. Building on his research into Chinese temples in Britain, he explores how computational methods can complement archival research and fieldwork in examining architectural form and cultural exchange.

 

He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), and a member of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), the Architectural Society of China (ASC), and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB). He also reviews for various international journals in architecture and planning.