Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2021
Yuexiu Hanyang Starry Winking Showroom
- A' Design Award 2021 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: Shanghai PTArchitects
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 24,484
- Verification code 8B5B6CF681 · Verify this award
About Yuexiu Hanyang Starry Winking Showroom
Yuexiu Hanyang Starry Winking is a sales center designed to be converted into a kindergarten after the selling period ends. The building is located in the Hanyang District of Wuhan, China, near the Yangtze River. The design concept draws on the natural landscape and the water culture of Wuhan. A modular facade with rhythmic changes suits the units of the future kindergarten and forms a playful surface. Prefabricated glass-fiber reinforced cement panels were assembled on site to reduce visible joints and ease cleaning. Water flows from the building into the surrounding landscape.
Shanghai PTArchitects's Yuexiu Hanyang Starry Winking Showroom presents itself as a meditation on the productive tension between organic expression and geometric discipline, capturing a moment of architectural poetry during the liminal hour between day and night. The design demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how buildings might engage landscape elements and sculptural interventions to create experiential richness that transcends mere functional accommodation. The chromium sculpture, with its reaching, branch-like extensions, appears to reference traditional scholar's rocks or the gnarled forms of ancient trees celebrated in classical garden traditions, here translated into contemporary material language that speaks of technological capability while honoring natural form. The architectural volume behind employs a restrained vocabulary of glass, metal, and carefully modulated light, creating a luminous presence that seems to hover above the dark reflective pool. The facade's rhythmic grid of windows establishes visual order, while sheer curtains visible within soften the interior views into veiled mysteries inviting closer exploration. The water feature functions as both physical threshold and metaphorical boundary, its still surface transforming the composition into a doubled image where architecture and sculpture exist simultaneously above and below the horizon line. The integration of living bamboo at the composition's edge introduces organic vertical elements that echo the sculpture's reaching gesture while providing textural contrast to the building's smooth surfaces. The lighting design reveals itself as a crucial compositional element, with warm interior illumination creating welcoming atmosphere while linear accent lights articulate the building's horizontal stratification. This interplay of natural and artificial light during twilight creates chromatic complexity that would be impossible at other hours. The work invites viewers to consider how contemporary architecture might honor landscape traditions while expressing current technological and aesthetic values, and how the threshold between interior and exterior might become a zone of contemplation rather than mere transition.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Formerly as a sales center, the project would be transformed into a kindergarten after the selling period is over. So the design difficulty lies in how to shift the same building between two kinds of architectural types.
The architects selected the modular surface with rhythmic change to build the facade, which could not only satisfy the use of every unit in the kindergarten, but also create a playful architectural surface. - Dimensions & Packaging
- Technical: Use modulus and regular section to satisfy different functional demands of kindergarten and sales center
Area: 2700sqm
Type: sales center - Tags
- Demonstration area, GRC, Kindergarten, Shanghai PTArchitects, Sale center, Water Element
- Production Technology
- We chose the prefabricated GRC (glass-fiber reinforced cement) for building materials. They were transported as a whole and were pieced together on site so as to reduce the cracks on the facade due to a large amount of assemblage and make it appear more complete. Besides, GRC is easy to clean, so the building could continuously maintain a better appearance.
- Design Challenge
- The design difficulty lies in how to shift the same building between two kinds of architectural types. The architects selected the modular surface with rhythmic change to build the facade, which could not only satisfy the use of every unit in the kindergarten, but also create a playful architectural surface. The facade is designed in a modern elegant style with simple champagne-colored metal frame and yellowish stone-like aluminum panels to highlight the building's grace.
- Project Duration
- Location:Hanyang District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China
Project Duration: December 2017-July 2019 - Operation Flow
- Water is a major element in the project. Cascading from the building to the landscape space, it ultimately merges into the landscape. The design team carefully builds the spaces that change rhythmically, and exquisitely creates the scenery that varies while visitors walking so as to make a demonstration area where visitors could have unique experiences. The main building is simply decorated in a pure design language that highlights the simplicity of its shape.
- Research
- By using both the modern design language and design method of spatial narrative, the urban landscape and historic memory slowly unfold before the changing spaces of the building. The natural landscape and cultural implications of the city become one and work together to evoke people's desire for a poetic life through its fours parts: entrance space, central demonstration space, transition space, and waterscape space.
- Inspiration
- The project is built by the Yangtze River and is located around the Yangsigang Yangtze River Bridge.
With the location as its first consideration, the project's design concept derives from natural landscape and cultural elements of water exclusive to Wuhan. A progressive spatial layout ensures that visitors could ever-changing landscape while walking step by step. - Image Credits
- Schran Images
Colors of Yuexiu Hanyang Starry Winking Showroom
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