Silver Event and Happening Design · 2021
Zhangyan Country Living Festival Exhibition Space
- A' Design Award 2021 Silver Winner in Event and Happening Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: Tongji Tiandi-Neili Lab
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 49,482
- Verification code 62D4242A6B · Verify this award
About Zhangyan Country Living Festival Exhibition Space
Zhangyan Country Living Festival is an exhibition space created for a rural event in Shanghai. The layout is formed from old shipping containers that are staggered, stacked, interlaced and rotated to shape varied thematic areas. One group of containers encloses an area for forums, while another group defines an area for a marketplace. Local discarded resources such as wood, straw and reeds are also used. The visual identity follows the Memphis style and abstracts local motifs of mountain, water, fish and bridge. The activity space covers 5000 square meters.
Situated within the evolving discourse of adaptive reuse architecture and temporary cultural infrastructure, this exhibition space by Jiaqing Wu demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how color, modularity, and transparency can transform utilitarian industrial objects into celebratory civic gathering places. The design participates in a contemporary architectural lineage that embraces the shipping container as both practical building block and symbolic gesture toward sustainability, resourcefulness, and global connectivity, yet transcends mere pragmatism through its exuberant chromatic treatment and careful attention to human experience at ground level. The technical achievement lies in the seamless integration of solid and void, opacity and transparency, where the fortress-like solidity of the upper container volume gives way to the welcoming permeability of the workshop spaces below, their glazed facades revealing interior activity and extending implicit invitation to passersby. The typographic elements function not merely as wayfinding but as architectural ornament in the contemporary sense, their scale and placement transforming the facade into a communicative surface that announces the structure's purpose while contributing to its visual identity. The chromatic choices appear deliberately selected to evoke optimism, creativity, and agricultural warmth, the coral pink perhaps suggesting sunrise or blossom, the orange echoing harvest abundance, the blue providing grounding stability. The blurred figures captured within the frame speak to the success of this space as a functioning social condenser, a place where community coalesces around shared cultural experience. One might consider how the tension between the container's origins as anonymous global logistics infrastructure and its transformation into place-specific cultural venue comments on themes of rootedness, belonging, and the creative reimagining of inherited material conditions.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Urban-rural co-creation innovation experiment initiated by Lou Yongqi, Dean of the D&I, Tongji University, John Sakara, Academician of the RAC, and Aldo Cibic, one of Memphis school founders, to advance practices of sustainable living.
We find the meeting point in various design fields through the exploration of cross-boundary thinking, thereby integrating design concepts to help brands systematically output.
Taking brand culture "innovation" and "sustainable" as the core spirit for the design. - Dimensions & Packaging
- The visual system design includes 5000 square meters of activity space.
- Tags
- Innovation，sustainable，Memphis，integrating design
- Production Technology
- The construction is built by using local abandoned containers and discarded native resources, e.g. wood, straw, and reeds.
- Design Challenge
- In order to fit the project proposition of "sustainable development", the space design is creatively combined with the original resources of the site. With the vitality given by design, its sustainability can be re stimulated; with the reuse of materials, a recyclable overall system can be established to reduce waste. The project market constructed with vitality system publicizes the concepts of "everything has an afterlife", "everything makes the best use of" and "each has its own place".
- Project Duration
- The project started in August 2019 in Shanghai and finished in November 2019.
- Operation Flow
- The original base is in an open suburban meadow, and in order to follow the purpose of environmental protection and sustainable exhibition, a number of old containers are used to form the activity area. By staggering, stacking, interlacing and stretching the containers, the simple rectangular bodies are combined into a variety of dynamic thematic exhibition space.
The left side of the site is distributed by two groups of containers on both sides, forming a more open enclosed form and providing an area for holding forums. On the right side, two groups of containers are rotated and disassembled into the site to create an activity space for holding a marketplace. - Research
- Based on the project design background, the design approach decided to follow the following principles: starting from the top design, integrating the independent and compatible relationships among the main visual design, space design and guidance system, and strengthening the systematic output of the brand to the audience. The project hopes to create a blueprint for rural life in the future. The main visual design integrates the design style of Memphis School, and abstracts the "mountain, water, fish, bridge" and other abstract graphics with the regional characteristics of Zhangyan to form the main visual symbol of this event in the form of abstract combination. The Memphis school's design attribute of daring to imagine and break the Convention coincides with the attribute of this event.
The overall visual identity design of the project is based on the Memphis style, starting from the exhibition, speech, workshop and market to carry out spatial narrative, conveying the concepts of "rural", "sustainable", "future" and "innovation". - Inspiration
- The Memphis school featuring creativity is used to integrate the elements of rural history and culture to form a brand image.
The brand graphics are three-dimensionally extended to form a systematic space design language.
To convey the sustainability sprint, the construction is built by using local abandoned containers and discarded native resources, e.g. wood, straw, and reeds.
We hope to lead the China rural revitalization with the idea of innovation and sustainability and design concept.
Colors of Zhangyan Country Living Festival Exhibition Space
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