Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2024
Anji Creative Design Center Urban and Rural Area
- A' Design Award 2024 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2024
- CLIENT: Anjihood
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 98,543
- Verification code 59E5D6D16C · Verify this award
About Anji Creative Design Center Urban and Rural Area
Anji Creative Design Center is a shared work and cultural building designed to connect urban and rural life. The center holds public services, co-working areas, an innovation lab, a library and a cafe. Spaces of different sizes are spread across the undulating site and linked by raised corridors and inner courtyards. Slim steel columns and glass curtain walls support vaulted roofs covered with planting, so the building blends into the surrounding tea fields. The design offers digital nomads and creators room for work, study, exhibitions and seminars.
Anjihood's Anji Creative Design Center Urban and Rural Area emerges from traditions of landscape-integrated architecture that have sought meaningful dialogue between built form and living systems, drawing upon both vernacular agricultural wisdom and contemporary environmental design thinking to create spaces that blur conventional distinctions between building and garden, architecture and ecology. The complex demonstrates remarkable compositional achievement through its orchestration of multiple pavilion volumes beneath continuous green roof surfaces, establishing visual rhythms that echo the surrounding rural terrain while accommodating sophisticated programmatic requirements for creative work and cultural exchange. Technical facility appears throughout in the precision of circulation pathways that navigate between buildings with both functional clarity and aesthetic elegance, their serpentine forms suggesting natural water courses while providing intuitive wayfinding through the complex. The chromatic restraint of white and gray architectural elements serves the larger environmental ambition, allowing verdant roof surfaces to visually merge with surrounding landscape and potentially reducing urban heat island effects while providing habitat value. Thematic resonances connect this work to broader cultural conversations about humanity's relationship with natural systems, suggesting possibilities for architecture that participates in ecological processes rather than merely minimizing environmental impact. The terraced forms visible at the composition's upper edge invoke millennia of agricultural landscape shaping, positioning contemporary sustainable design within longer trajectories of human environmental stewardship. One might observe how the complex invites consideration of architecture as an act of cultivation rather than construction, asking visitors to experience buildings as living entities requiring ongoing care and changing with seasons. How might such spaces transform our understanding of what buildings can be and do within ecological communities?
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This project aims to create a new type of shared space that serves the local community and attracts urban groups to swamp rural areas, forming a public space that links urban and rural areas. The design of the ACDC adopts a more flexible approach, with spaces of different sizes distributed across the undulating site and connected with corridors. Thus, the two groups of collective space for public service, co-working, innovation lab, library, and cafe accommodate diverse programs and activities.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Land area: 18,450sqm, floor area: 9,388sqm, capacity building area: 8,044sqm, underfloor building area: 344sqm.
White Tea Museum's land area: 4,683sqm, capacity building area: 4,339sqm, underfloor building area: 344sqm.
Shang Ma Kan Museum's land area: 3,705sqm, capacity building area: 3,705sqm, underfloor building area: 0sqm. - Tags
- Landscape architecture, planting roofing, curved roof, solid slim steel columns, environmental context, organic variations, co-working, shared space, bonding the urban and the rural, rural revitalization.
- Production Technology
- This project innovatively creates a planting roof that blends into the landform. Solid slim steel columns and glass curtain walls support vaulted roofs, creating a captivating visual effect characterized by a gracefully soft silhouette and an ethereal ambiance. Together with the corridors connecting the roofs and the Zen-inspired inner courtyards, the architecture lies low in the natural landscape while blending well with the mesmerizing west-south White Tea Mountain.
- Design Challenge
- The major challenge for this project is how to gravitate digital nomad and creative staff and serve as a public space bonding the urban and the rural. The design adopts a flexible approach. Co-working, learning, and exhibitions can be simultaneously held in different spaces thanks to the fluidity of inner space. The roof is covered with plants, as a reconstruction of the countryside landform, giving more possibilities for the landscape design. Thus, the 8,320sqm structure lies low in the hills.
- Project Duration
- The project finished in July 2022.
- Operation Flow
- This design includes public services, co-working, innovation labs, libraries, cafés, and other collective spaces. The architectural design adopts a flexible approach, responding to the topography while addressing the traditional layout of the corridor-courtyard. Visitors can roam around freely on the lifted corridors. The design creates an interactive space with the interweaving of multiple functions for digital nomad and creators to engage in work, study, exhibitions, and seminars.
- Research
- Under the rising global trend of digital nomad and remote working, the place seeks to bring together like-minded creators, thus creating a happier, more dynamic working environment. Other additional space is expected to showcase creative outcomes and offer shared public services. It is the key concern of the ACDC to ensure spatial flexibility, to enable the interweaving of multiple functions, and the design is expected to be held as a great example to respond to the landscape of the countryside.
- Inspiration
- The architectural form adapts to the undulating tea fields. Its horizontally orthogonal spatial system seems to be an extension of the city, but vertically it adds undulation to the already undulating terrain. This both guarantees the function of the space and indicates the characteristics of the original terrain. People can roam around freely. The public space connects to the local agricultural production, serving as an extension of the countryside and contributing to its sustainability.
- Image Credits
- Anjihood