-
Architects: TJAD Original Design Studio
- Area: 7267 m²
- Year: 2021
-
Photographs:ZY Architectural Photography
-
Lead Architects: Ming Zhang, Zi Zhang
Text description provided by the architects. We first visited the site in an early winter afternoon. Driving through the neat sequoias on both sides of Qianshao Road, we can see the water tower hidden in the dense trees. Stepping into the factory, a group of quite large-scale sawtooth-shaped factory buildings on the north side of the site conveyed the grand story with the memory of the weaving factory, while the rest of the small dilapidated buildings were scattered among the overgrown greenery and faded into the environment. This iconic group of factory buildings and water towers were kept as a memory of the site, stripped from the environment.
To meet the needs of flood control, we built a dike to form an ecological green dike around the site. This ecological green dike system is enlarged as nodes on the east and west sides of the sawtooth-shaped plant, forming two groups of landscape architectures and a juxtaposition with the main plant. The architecture itself often has a unique sense of the field, and the features of space will gradually spread from the architecture to the surrounding places like ripples, while the juxtaposition will bring about the overlap of different fields, thus creating more interesting spaces.
The two new volumes juxtaposed with the main factories are chosen to be treated in the form of landscaping, with the intention of weakening the formality of the new buildings, simplifying their exterior and enhancing the diversity of the interior space, and placing them on both sides of the old factories in landscaping. The conference center is on the west side, while a group of staggering volumes facing the river is on the east side, forming a set of street spaces in dialogue with the old and the new with the preserved factories.
The diffuse path of the green embankment system continues to extend, and the sawtooth-shaped factory rooms in the two core groups intervene with another new juxtaposition strategy. Two concrete walls extend out from the dike system, inserting themselves through the gap between the two sets of old factory rooms, rising up and folding over to support the steel and wood volumes suspended in the air. Viewed from further away from the site, it appears to be a wooden box suspended from the sawtooth-shaped roof of the old factory, giving it an illusionary implication. We could look out over the roof below in the viewing room on the top floor, finding a connection to the memory of a place in the new space.
In contrast to the juxtaposition mentioned above, the juxtaposition of the old and the new is vertical due to the spatial constraints of the current situation; the space between the old buildings in the lower part of the new volume is the intersection of this juxtaposition, which is more interesting; we enclose it with a transparent glass interface as the central lobby and shared space of the hotel. To further increase the artistry and interest of the space, we have further interpreted the two concrete walls, which twist inside the space, giving the originally regular scale space a rhythm of retraction, and the curved walls create more possibilities for composite functions such as art display.
Among the two groups of sawtooth-shaped factories retained, the northern group has a large scale of internal space on the north side of the vast rice field landscape and is considered to be transformed into a two-story space to improve the efficiency of utilization. Due to the constraints of the existing beams, the space on the second floor could not meet the user demand, so we replaced the original slope roof by using metal flat roofing to obtain better space conditions for the second-floor guest rooms, and also formed a different rhythm of time on the roof. On the south side, a group of factories with lower heights has larger scales. Through the overall structural reinforcement and partial de-roofing into a courtyard, we transformed them into the characteristic courtyard guest rooms, preserving the patina of the roof frame and reflecting the courtyard landscape; while the private space is implanted in the form of new heterogeneous volume, forming a juxtaposition of the old and the new. The space serves as a medium to link the different forms of construction.
