Silver Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2022
Haimen Agricultural Exhibition Hall
by Gad
- A' Design Award 2022 Silver Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2022
- CLIENT: Gad
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 17,486
- Verification code BC6AE52B78 · Verify this award
About Haimen Agricultural Exhibition Hall
Haimen Agricultural is an exhibition hall for seeds and farming culture in Nantong, China. The form is taken from the traditional barn, with a square outer volume and a round central silo. The outer skin is made of ultra high performance concrete, which forms a visual contrast with the glass curtain wall. A rotating open stair links four floors around a central atrium, and a folded roof plate brings daylight to the top floor. The building covers 4000 square meters and offers a place for display and exchange.
The Haimen Agricultural Exhibition Hall by gad represents a distinguished contribution to contemporary institutional architecture that thoughtfully navigates the complex dialogue between regional heritage and global architectural discourse. This work emerges from a design philosophy that seeks to honor agricultural traditions while embracing the expressive possibilities of contemporary construction technologies and material systems, resulting in a structure that appears simultaneously rooted in place and aspirational in its formal ambitions. The perforated metal facade system achieves remarkable visual delicacy at monumental scale, its intricate pattern suggesting traditional paper-cutting arts and decorative craft traditions translated into weather-resistant contemporary materials, thereby encoding cultural memory within technologically advanced building envelope systems. The sawtooth roofline, historically associated with industrial and agricultural buildings designed to capture consistent northern light, here becomes an expressive formal gesture that creates dramatic silhouette against the twilight sky while presumably serving functional daylighting purposes within exhibition spaces. The stepped massing strategy demonstrates sophisticated volumetric composition, creating a dynamic ascending profile that engages the skyline without overwhelming the pastoral landscape context, suggesting a building that seeks dialogue rather than dominance with its natural surroundings. The relationship between the new intervention and adjacent traditional structures speaks to a design approach that values cultural continuity, with the exhibition hall's white materiality establishing chromatic kinship with vernacular whitewashed walls while its contemporary formal language announces a distinctly contemporary presence. The waterfront siting amplifies the building's visual impact through reflection while connecting programmatically to the agricultural landscapes that depend upon water management systems, potentially referencing the essential relationship between water and cultivation that defines agrarian heritage. This image invites contemplation of how architectural form might embody cultural values, asking viewers to consider how buildings can simultaneously preserve tradition and embrace innovation.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The building maximizes the footprint of the barn and excavates a blowing space in the center. The circular silo is introduced with natural lighting and ventilation. As a seed Museum, it provides a place to display and communicate; The rotating open stairs connect the various functions in the vertical direction of the building. The visitors step up , just like stepping on a seed journey, and their desire for viewing and exploration is constantly stimulated.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The exhibition hall covers a construction area of 4000 square meters and is divided into four floors.The scheme breaks the conventional concept of "layer" in structure: 4 concrete square boxes circling around the atrium hide the main stress components in the rotating space; The roof folded plate forms a large area of windows on the top floor, realizing the purity of architectural form and space. Traditional regional context and modern lifestyle meet here.
- Tags
- Barn, Countryside, Nostalgia, Exhibition, Context, Poetic Dwelling
- Production Technology
- The outer skin is made of UHPC material. This material with low porosity is as warm as jade, which can highlight the shape and lines of the building itself. From a distance, it has sharp edges and corners, and from a close look, it is soft and hazy. The faint sense of permeability blurs the boundary between the building and the environment. It forms a visual contrast with the glass curtain wall, which vividly explains the relationship between enclosure and connection, closure and permeability.
- Design Challenge
- In today's traditional cultural Renaissance, the design team uphold the dialectical and critical attitude. Ineither to the nostalgia of special regionalism of restoring ancient ways, nor under the globalization trend blindly follow internationalism, they build a poetic residence among the pastoral roads and recovered the wisdom gene in the heritage of Chinese Wu and Yue culture, so as to store culture, place emotions and condense values, Complete critical regionalism practice.
- Project Duration
- The project started in October 2020 in Nantong, China and finished in April 2021.
- Operation Flow
- The mortise and tenon structure of the silo dispels the divinity of the space with the color and touch of old wood, making the barn warm and amiable. The two sets of indoor and outdoor stairs form a parallel viewing moving line, overlooking the pastoral scenery, surrounding buildings and internal activities of the agricultural exhibition hall. Visitors can directly enter the town demonstration area and agricultural exhibition area from the west exit of the exhibition hall.
- Research
- Haimen is the hinterland of Chinese Wu Yue culture and the hometown of Chinese rice culture. China has a long agricultural civilization which is the first form of civilization in human history and determines the characteristics of Chinese culture.The design concept of "the sky is round and the earth is square" is reflected in ancient Chinese architecture which symbolize the ideas of "external Confucianism and internal law" in politics and " flexible outwardly and strict inwardly" in life.
- Inspiration
- The motif of the agricultural exhibition hall is taken from the barn of Chinese agricultural civilization. Its appearance is like a square box , the internal core is a circular silo, which means "square barn and round granary". It not only implies the legalist concept of "When the granaries are full, people follow appropriate rules of conduct, and when there is enough to eat and wear, people know honor and shame", but also conforms to the construction of spiritual civilization in the new era.
- Image Credits
- Image #1:Photographer YAOLI STUDIO, Architecture and environment ,2021
Image #2:Photographer YAOLI STUDIO,Aerial view,2021
Image #3:Photographer YAOLI STUDIO,Facade effect ,2021
Image #4:Photographer YAOLI STUDIO,Detail material,2021
Image #5:Photographer YAOLI STUDIO,Internal barn,2021 - Patents
- Copyrights belong to gad, 2021.
Colors of Haimen Agricultural Exhibition Hall
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