Alex Yueyan Li

Alex Yueyan Li is co-principal of 11 x 17, an award-winning architecture practice based in Toronto and Denver. Working across buildings, public pavilions, and interiors, 11 x 17 begins each project with a deep examination at materiality— a conceptual device for orchestrating resource, labor, and form, thereby conditioning how a building might come into being. Often in close collaboration with engineers and contractors, the practice sees building as an ongoing, reactive, repositorial process in which any stage in a building's lifecycle can be spatially exciting. With built work spanning the US, Canada, and China, the practice has been published globally in Dezeen, ArchDaily, Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, DesignTO, Architectural Record, AZURE, Architect's Newspaper, and Archinect, and featured at institutions including the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Columbia University. In 2025, 11 x 17 received the League Prize, established in 1981 to recognize visionary work by young practitioners, from the Architectural League of New York.

Before co-founding the office with Mahsa Malek, Alex practiced internationally in design offices across Tokyo, Shanghai, Boston, Toronto, and New York, developing a working knowledge of how buildings are conceived and constructed across vastly different regulatory, cultural, and material contexts. He has taught at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he received the Irving Innovation Fellowship and the Clifford Wong Housing Prize. As an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver, he leads design studios and construction courses to re-examine core disciplinary concepts as emerging concerns around preservation, reuse, and circularity unsettle the terms by which materials enter architecture.