Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2022
Slab Hill Lifestyle Lab
by Greentown China Holdings Limited
- A' Design Award 2022 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2022
- CLIENT: Greentown China Holdings Limited
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 28,712
- Verification code 57C1CC473C · Verify this award
About Slab Hill Lifestyle Lab
Slab Hill is a lifestyle center built in Changsha, China. The building covers 2071 square meters and is formed from 45 umbrella-shaped structural units. Three unit sizes, based on a three meter module, are combined into a plan that can grow. Almost all interior walls are removed, so the spaces between the umbrella columns stay open and flowing. The umbrella surfaces are clad in glass fiber reinforced concrete with a horizontal cascading texture in earthy colors. The intent is to place a small artificial hill within an everyday suburban landscape.
Greentown China Holdings Limited's Slab Hill Lifestyle Lab emerges as a compelling exemplar of contemporary architectural practice that seeks meaningful reconciliation between built form and natural environment, demonstrating how sophisticated structural engineering can achieve poetic expression through biomorphic abstraction. The building's most distinctive feature, its series of dramatically cantilevered roof planes supported by inverted pyramidal timber-clad columns, suggests an architectural interpretation of the spreading canopy of mature trees, creating sheltered outdoor spaces that mediate between interior program and surrounding landscape. This approach resonates with longstanding architectural traditions of the pavilion typology, structures conceived as permeable thresholds between human habitation and the natural world, while simultaneously engaging contemporary discourse around biophilic design and environmental responsiveness. The technical accomplishment evident in the cantilever execution, where substantial roof planes extend outward without visible support beyond their tapering column bases, demonstrates structural confidence achieved through careful engineering and material selection. The chromatic strategy employs warm timber tones that establish dialogue with organic materials while the extensive glazing maintains visual lightness and programmatic transparency. The landscape design, with its geometric pathway system creating formal counterpoint to the organic architectural gestures, suggests careful consideration of processional experience and spatial sequence. One observes how the rooftop plantings continue the vertical gesture of surrounding trees, integrating the building's silhouette into its arboreal context. The overall composition invites contemplation of shelter as both practical necessity and poetic aspiration, how architecture might simultaneously protect and connect, define and dissolve, achieving the seemingly paradoxical condition of grounded levity that distinguishes memorable spatial experiences.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The designers restored a certain "self-explanatory" of the basic unit through architectural forms and structural expressions, and to realize artificially reconstructed non-daily experience of the landscape through the organizational growth of this unit, the complex implantation of multi-functions, and the superimposed penetration of landscape and greenery.
It dispels almost all of the interior walls and the plans between the umbrella columns create a highly free, flowing spatial reorganization. - Dimensions & Packaging
- Area: 2071 sqm
The glass curtain wall is basically supported by T-beams as the keel and all interior partitions are clad in mirror stainless steel. The continuous, vanishing interior interface weakens the presence of the rods while emphasizing the extended display of the glass surface. The glass curtain wall intersecting with the umbrella conceals the frames and components within the joint recesses of the GRC curtain wall, ensuring structural integrity and purity as far as possible. - Tags
- Greentowm, Umbrella-shaped Building, Sales Center, Lifestyle Lab, gad/line+
- Production Technology
- The GRC material texture of the umbrella units is interpretive of the structure and we have chosen earthy colors that are close to nature. In order to find the most suitable GRC texture density, we went through several stages of computer simulation, 3D printing and physical prototyping to precisely control the horizontal texture, thus achieving a cascading texture.
- Design Challenge
- The site is surrounded by two main urban roads in the east and north, a planned high-density neighborhood in the south, and an urban river spreading out from the Songya Lake wetland basin on the west, where artificial and natural fragmentation intertwine during rapid urbanization. Faced with the lack of context of the site, we intend to stimulate this everyday suburban landscape by inserting a small heterogeneous "hill"-the "Slab Hill".
- Project Duration
- The project started in January 2021 in Changsha, Hunan Province, China and finished in August 2021 in Changsha, Hunan Province, China.
- Operation Flow
- As the name suggests, the "Slab Hill" is an artificial hill based on an umbrella-shaped structural unit. The umbrella-shaped structure was chosen as a structural prototype because of its clear and simple "column-slab" structural support system and the sense of domain created by the large spatial coverage, and because umbrella shapes are common in the plant world-from small umbrella-shaped mushrooms to trees like Dracaena draco-which highlights the bionic traits.
- Research
- After identifying the structural prototype as the basic cell unit, we formed three kinds of structural units of 6x6m, 6x12m and 9x18m using 3m as the basic module. The design further revolves around the need for spatial capacity, with the 45 umbrella structures meeting the seismic requirements with a uniform canopy edge distance of 2m and a limited number of connections, which are then combined in the same series of modules to form a homogeneous "growabl"eplane.
- Inspiration
- In order to build a deep foundation of dialogue with nature in the everyday urban site, we envisage a new architectural prototype based on the fractal geometry of nature-the smallest structural unit in the construction process as the basic spatial unit, which, with a certain"self-similarity", thus building up the architectural form-this evolution of the building from unit to whole is similar to the natural growth of a living creature in response to the laws of nature.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer LI YI, MZ STUDIOS
Image #2: Photographer LI YI, MZ STUDIOS
Image #3: Photographer LI YI, MZ STUDIOS
Image #4: Photographer LI YI, MZ STUDIOS
Image #5: Photographer MZ STUDIOS
Colors of Slab Hill Lifestyle Lab
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