Project Overview

Located in Liangjiang Village, Heshan Street, high-speed rail new city area, Pujiang County, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, the project is adjacent to Yujiabian, a historical and cultural village. The site is near Pujiang River in the west and Wange Mountain in the east, enjoying unique natural landscape and cultural resources. As the starting point of the auxiliary service facilities and commercial blocks of overall plan, the project presents a cluster of small buildings scattered along Pujiang River's waterfront. In order to create an important node of the commercial block with town characteristics beside the mountains and rivers and a service engine for the whole community, the design takes "waterfront natural growth" and "rural life" as the starting point for thinking to create a building group that grows naturally like local waterfront villages, restoring the local sustainable rural life style that has disappeared for a long time.

Organisation

HZS

Team

Huang Yiying, Chen Ruiyi, Cao Jianjun, Zhang Yong, Zhang Li, Zhu Guozhi

Project Brief

The low-rise slope roof buildings are semi-enclosed to form a building group, with an overall area of about 2,500 square meters. Its service functions involve exhibitions, high-end dining, banquets, recreation, etc. The peripheral venues are arranged to have country park experience such as parent-child farm and tent camp. The property of the site is integrated to create a leisure tourism experience integrating "agriculture", "tourism", "commerce" and "residence", truly realizing the integration of nature, village and rural elements into life.

Project Innovation/Need

Out of respect for the cultural heritage of the thousand-year-old county, the architectural facade of the project conducts spatial research on traditional architectural group samples such as Yujiabian Historical Village and Heshan Academy. The layout adopts a lot of white space, allowing the building to integrate with the environment.
However, the architectural form that breaks away from the constraints of form is more of an emotional drive of pastoral attribution. As a guiding element of the Chinese style walking space, the layered and overhanging space under the eaves can better complete the collective memory and experience the transition from nature to commerce. The seemingly disordered eaves do not yield to the relationship between the width and the central room, but like strings that fill the landscape with rhythm, or bead curtains that create a misty beauty. Hemp rope is used to wrap around the thin steel columns to ease the cold touch and bring natural charm.
As an architectural semantics feedback to the unique nature of the project site, the ultimate aim of the design is to create a resort-style pastoral life. It is a place accompanied by nature and a "utopian village" in daily life, the architecture and environment achieve a spatial state with free layout.

Design Challenge

For such topics as locality and the inheritance of Chinese style, many designs give rigorous and even serious answers, so it is inevitable that they will be symbolized and follow the general trend, resulting in a lack of tasteful artistic conception, freedom and elegance.
In the design process, before the clear architectural form being formed, the designers will always look back to see whether the locality of the building and the pure characteristics that are not constrained by the fixed form are still retained, so as to achieve a relaxed perception. The project draws on traditional tile, stone, wood and other materials and practices with distinct regional features, interprets the materials used in local dwellings in a concise and abstract way, and reflects the wildness and fun with a combination of collisions between roughness and delicacy. The application of local materials narrows the distance between architecture and people, and makes the whole building present a more interesting expression.

Sustainability

The impact of a building on the environment is considered to be the key to the assessment of whether a building is sustainable, so in the early stages of design, the project tries to minimize the compaction of the site. Except for the necessary main building, it maximizes the proportion of natural vegetation, and microclimatic water features, rugged flagstone paths, and wild hedges made of plants or bamboo allow the building's delicate cornice and metal mullioned window to harmoniously integrate with nature and countryside in a low carbon way.
Even the paving at the entrance deliberately leaves space for the moss to grow, so that people can still explore growth and season changes while walking. This is a kind of experiential architecture that introduces ecological ideas into behavior.
The scattered houses and winding flagstone paths create a wonderful spatial sequence and present pastoral dwellings. Only the most natural and long-lasting connection between the building and the site can withstand the aesthetic changes and the test of time.