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Architects: VIASCAPE design
- Area: 70 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:CreatAR Images
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Lead Architect: Yijia Sun
Breakthrough ： Rebuilding the daily public life for the residents
The Pavilion is located in XiangDong village, a Huangpu riverside community that is composed of mostly grungy apartment buildings. 480 local families live here in a room of only 10 square meters of clear floor space. The designer applied a positive design approach with a focus on a questionnaire survey and interviews as a start. With this method, the final design provides a reconstructed space that maintains local inhabitants’ daily life.
The design uses white concrete as the main material considering various impacts such as background color, materials of the surrounding structure, and potential maintenance with regards to the limited size of the Pavilion, the traditional frame structure is replaced with a frame-supported short-leg shear wall and flat slab system. With the optimized structural system, a bigger and more integrated spatial experience is provided for users. On top of this, an open-up interface shaped with a physical combination of wood flooring and glass staircase on a human scale offers a sense of warmness, guiding better human behavior. Generated from user-oriented design, the Pavilion represents a “common landscape object” which matches the local character. It also serves as a spiritual home shining bright like a diamond.
Composition: A contemporary translation from the traditional pavilion
The ballad of the Pavilion
A pavilion
This is where the step rest
Is where the body settles
The Pavilion
is where conveying coldness to warmness
is where transferring negativity to positivity
where sharing and bonding happen
is a kaleidoscope to be indulged in
warmly lit candlelight for night returners
The shape of the community house has to be “slim” due to the limited site area. Responding to the result of the questionnaire and the idea of time sharing, 3 main functional modules including shared living room/playroom, reading/dining room, and laundry are defined and are furthermore matched with levels, zonings, and morphologies to eventually form an organic coupling space.
The recessed space on 1st floor forms the first part of the grey space, which lays a crucial spatial foundation for friendly behavior. Light emitting during nighttime makes the pavilion a beacon to guide the way back home. A maple tree is deliberately planted in front of the doorstep. It bears a design intention to “create a Zen world with a single tree”, which also responds to the garden characteristics of the Pavilion, and brushes a green stroke on top of the community’s blank base.
Blending： Maximized interaction between public life and limited landscape
The second part of the 1st-floor grey space is established with a fully openable indoor space. In the design framework of “permeable bottom and solid top”, the permeability of the 1st floor is a maximal expression of a sense of community. The permeability is about to be utilized to afford the most multifunctional self-organized activities for people of all ages. The shared permeable 1st-floor space for public activities also becomes a central stage for users to view and to be viewed. The public life evolving on the base of the Pavilion represents the most significant viable landscape in the community.
Space on the 2nd floor majorly functioned as a “shared reading and dining room”. A sense of tranquility is created with solid space. With a thoughtful cut ceiling corner, the designer positioned a series of windows at various planes to let indoor space interact with Spruce trees, maple trees, and other landscape elements in the surroundings. The dialogue between indoor and outdoor maximizes the utilization of limited landscape resources under the inadequate existing space. The design process of the Xiangdong community house extensively engaged public participation from functional analysis to morphology genesis and construction supervision. This is a new trial in respect of space-making and Genius loci. It also activates the lifestyle in an old community, rebuilding faith in building a new life.
