Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2020
Alila Wuzhen Hotel
by Lu Hao and Zhang Xun - G O A
- A' Design Award 2020 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2020
- CLIENT: GOA (Group of Architects)
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 32,214
- Verification code 4513404E38 · Verify this award
About Alila Wuzhen Hotel
Alila Wuzhen is a hotel inspired by the water towns south of the Yangtze River. The overall plan takes traditional villages of the region as its prototype, and retains their spatial forms, basic elements, building scales and color relations. Direct decorative elements are avoided, and fine materials, simple structures and quiet modern colors are used instead. Wide glass surfaces, large door leaves and deep overhanging eaves form a continuous and orderly frame. Streets, lanes and courtyards are given new functions. The hotel covers 25000 square meters.
GOA (Group of Architects)'s Alila Wuzhen Hotel emerges as a compelling meditation on the possibilities inherent in contemporary hospitality architecture when designers engage deeply with regional building traditions and landscape integration principles that have evolved over centuries of accumulated wisdom. The project appears to draw upon the rich heritage of water town settlement patterns characteristic of this cultural region, wherein architecture and hydrology exist in symbiotic relationship, structures cluster organically like crystalline formations, and the boundary between built and natural environments achieves a poetic ambiguity that speaks to fundamental philosophical concepts of harmony between human habitation and the natural world. The compositional strategy of dispersing the hotel program across numerous individual pavilion structures rather than consolidating into a singular monolithic mass suggests an understanding that the experiential quality of traditional settlement fabric derives precisely from its incremental accretion, its varied rooflines creating skyline rhythms, and its intimate scale allowing direct dialogue between interior spaces and surrounding landscape. Technical accomplishment manifests in the precise calibration of roof proportions, the careful articulation of wall-to-roof junctions, and the sophisticated integration of contemporary amenities within forms that honor vernacular precedent without descending into nostalgic pastiche. The chromatic restraint of the grey-and-white palette allows the architecture to function as a composed neutral ground against which the seasonal transformations of the surrounding vegetation can register with heightened intensity, suggesting awareness that hospitality architecture must create settings for human experience rather than demanding attention for itself. One might contemplate how this approach to dispersed massing creates opportunities for discovery, surprise, and individual relationship with landscape that centralized planning would preclude, inviting consideration of how spatial organization shapes the phenomenology of dwelling and the possibilities for contemplative retreat.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This project overall pattern takes villages south of the Yangtze River as its prototype, and retains the spatial forms, basic elements, architectural scales and color relations of traditional tribes. The tranquil water surface and pure architectural form are well coordinated, which perfectly reflects the multi-level and semi-transparent relations between buildings, between buildings and plants, as well as between buildings and water surface.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- GFA: 25000 square meters
- Tags
- Maze, Minimalist, Village, Abstract, Nature
- Production Technology
- Extensive application of glass, large span of door leaf and large size of overhanging eave blend together, forming a continuous and orderly frame. With well-proportioned shapes, volumes of different sizes and orderly layout, the building meets various functional demands.
- Design Challenge
- In the “imitation” and “reconstruction” of water towns south of the Yangtze River, the hotel has completed its inheritance of local culture and the spatial prototype of villages south of the Yangtze River, and tallied well with the special demands of the hotel for “unconventional” experience and “dramatic” scenarios. In such a unique architectural community, the history has encountered with the contemporary era, and the image of a modern village in organic growth appears vividly.
- Project Duration
- The project started design in 2014 and finished in 2018.
- Operation Flow
- The architects also explored the possibility of traditional space reconstruction, and endowed streets, lanes, courtyards and other spatial types with new functions and spirits; meanwhile, the well-proportioned spaces full of twists and turns, usually seen in classic villages south of the Yangtze River, are still inherited in this project.
- Research
- The hotel design followed the “minimalist” aesthetic tendency of Oriental culture, and the architect captured and extracted the concise, exquisite and silent aesthetic interest of buildings south of the Yangtze River, abandoned all straightforward decorative elements, and introduced fine materials, concise structures and quietly elegant colors with modern tones instead, so that individual buildings of pure forms can repetitively emerge and organically grow.
- Inspiration
- The hotel design followed the "minimalist"aesthetic tendency of Oriental culture, and the architect captured and extracted the concise, exquisite and silent aesthetic interest of buildings south of the Yangtze River, abandoned all straightforward decorative elements, and introduced fine materials, concise structures and quietly elegant colors with modern tones instead, so that individual buildings of pure forms can repetitively emerge and organically grow. "complicated cluster"constitutes the most important structural characteristic of traditional villages.
- Image Credits
- Video credits: SCHRAN and GOA
Photo credits: SCHRAN, GOA, Alila Wuzhen
Colors of Alila Wuzhen Hotel
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