Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2021
Hefu Display Center
- A' Design Award 2021 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2021
- CLIENT: Shanghai PTArchitects
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 21,207
- Verification code 3E79967E6C · Verify this award
About Hefu Display Center
Hefu is a display center located in Conghua, Guangzhou, China. The building takes jade as its theme and follows the stages of jade making. The entrance is built from simple stone with a jade-like texture, and hidden linear lighting makes the entrance look lighter. The jade-like texture is used throughout the building, from the entrance gate to the main structure, the reception lobby and the meeting area. Pebbles collected from the river and a mirror-like water feature shape the outdoor areas. Transparent glass brings the surrounding scenery into the interior.
WRight Communication's Hefu Display Center exemplifies the contemporary impulse toward architectural hybridization, wherein rigorous geometric frameworks become armatures for organic intervention, suggesting dialogue between technological precision and natural proliferation. The design demonstrates sophisticated understanding of material semiotics, deploying a deliberate vocabulary of contrasts: the weight and permanence of masonry walls against the apparent weightlessness of the steel lattice; the controlled geometry of the structural grid against the seemingly spontaneous cascade of botanical elements; the reflective stillness of the water feature against the vertical dynamism of the tower above. This work participates in established traditions of architectural dematerialization traceable through modernist precedents while simultaneously engaging contemporary discourse surrounding biophilic design principles and the reintegration of natural systems within built environments. The compositional strategy achieves notable success through its management of visual hierarchy, with the tower functioning simultaneously as sculptural object, spatial threshold, and symbolic marker within the landscape. The chromatic restraint—limiting the palette to atmospheric blues, warm neutrals, and metallic grays—allows the architectural intervention to achieve presence without aggression, monumentality without bombast. Particularly accomplished passages include the treatment of the reflecting pool, whose obsidian surface creates a zone of contemplative stillness that anchors the vertical aspiration above, and the gradual densification of organic material as the eye travels upward through the lattice, suggesting natural growth processes constrained within geometric frameworks. The interior glimpse visible through the glazed ground floor introduces human scale and inhabited warmth, preventing the composition from achieving purely abstract monumentality. Viewers might contemplate how this structure negotiates the threshold between interior sanctuary and exterior environment, between cultural institution and landscape feature, and how architectural form might embody aspirations toward harmony between human construction and natural systems.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Combining features of the river’s inclusiveness, stone’s purity and jade’s transparency, the display center is designed in a modern minimal style. The design language is based on the exploration of very basic elements, such as light, space, transparency, materiality, and layout, etc. The concise and transparent technique used breaks the boundaries between internal and external spaces, and the form and facade of the building are built on the element of light and natural resources.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The natural and simple pebbles collected from the river reflects the main body of the display center. The jade installation at the entrance indicates the structure of the entrance and interior space of the building, which represents the history and culture that have been nurtured for a long time in Conghua. A mirror-like waterscape is slowly unfolded like an ink painting scroll that becomes the highlight point of the entire space circulation tour. At the same time, the scenery is invited to the interior room through the transparent glass.
- Tags
- display center, humanistic spirit, jade-like texture, spatial expansion
- Production Technology
- The project is located in Conghua, Guangzhou, an ancient town in Southern China where the Neolithic ruins are unearthed. With the accumulation of thousands of years of history and culture, it has nurtured a long-standing humanistic spirit and natural landscape. The designer draws on the impression of the town, takes jade as the theme of the design, the process of jade making as the context and connects different functional spaces with different jade cultural landscapes, and at the same time extract elements from jade culture then re-interpret them in a new manner, and aims to create new cultural perspective while keeping the local culture.
- Design Challenge
- Due to the limited and restricted urban land resources, the challenge for the architect is how to change the small sized site into a space imbued with comfortable space experience, and at the same time to improve the quality of life of the residents.
The architect combines local traditional culture into a modern delicate facade, trying to create a lively scene where people, nature, and the city live in harmony. Inspired by the process of jade making, the four stages “jade nurturing”, “jade grinding by nature”, “jade polishing” and “jade created” and difference themes are borrowed into four main spaces: interface display area, front area landscape area, display center, and backyard model area. - Project Duration
- The project started in July 2018 and finished in January 2019 in Guangzhou, China
- Operation Flow
- From the entrance to the backyard, from outdoor or indoor space, the jade-like texture is used throughout the building, such as the entrance gate, jade scene, the stone material for the main building, vertical building structure, reception lobby, and meeting area, etc. All the materials are carefully selected.
- Research
- The design is closely related to the theme of the jade making. When designing the logo, the designer use one Chinese character He (which literally means harmony) from Hefu and combine natural rough stone (the left part of the character He) with finely polished stone material(e(the left part of the character He) which indicates the process how a piece of jade is made.
- Inspiration
- Gamble stone is a term in the jewelry industry in China, which means that when the rough jade is covered by a layer of weathered stone skin when mined, so it is impossible to know the quality of the inside unless it is cut furtherly. The entrance of Hefu Display Center uses simple stone material with jade-like texture, which is untraditional and the hidden linear lighting makes the entrance visually lighter, which resembles a layer furtherly cut into the gamble stone that draws people’s attention to explore inside.
- Image Credits
- IMAGE by Yuan Yang