Xu Tiantian is born in Fujian in 1975. She was admitted directly to the Department of Architecture at Tsinghua University in 1992. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua in 1997 and went on to earn a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 2000. She is currently a professor at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. Xu was named an International Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2020 and elected a member of the German Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in 2024.

Her work has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the Swiss Architectural Award (2022), the Berlin Art Prize (2023), the Marcus Prize for Architecture (USA), the Holcim Gold Award for Asia-Pacific, and the UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture. In 2025, she received the Wolf Prize in Architecture. Xu has also held visiting professorships at Yale University and the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in Switzerland.

In recent years, Xu has focused on architecture in China’s rural regions. Her practice is dedicated to rural revitalization through a strategy she describes as “architectural acupuncture”—small-scale, site-specific interventions designed to activate local culture, agriculture, and tourism. In 2019, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) recognized her Songyang “architectural acupuncture” initiative as a global model for urban–rural integration.