Category B-1 Gold Winner

Category B-1: Public Amenity Commercial Buildings    
Gold Winner

Award credit: Di Ma    
Location: Beijing, China    
Photography: nature image

This project within the context of China’'s urban renewal is an exploration of design that is full of imagination and humanistic considerations. It aims to bring new life to old buildings and also seeks to contribute to the daily life of the city and stimulate the vitality of the community, while also exploring more possibilities in the relationship between architecture and urban daily life, to bring more public space to the people. 

In addition to transforming the old abandoned police station into a new enterprise office building, this project also redefines the “red line” of the site with a three-dimensional “folding park,” forming a multilevel open community space between the building and the street. This “red line” between buildings and the street, which was once used to declare and define these specific areas, has now become an open, shared vitality trigger zone, which has greatly activated the vitality of the old urban area.

The “folding park” sets up a series of engaging facilities, such as a swing, slide, punching bag, see-saw, and basketball frame, and connects with the roof park, creating space for a variety of community activities. New facilities can also be “plugged in” to the “folding park” as needed, allowing it grow freely, in tandem with the community’s activities and use of it. 

The façade of the building is covered with specular reflective materials, which hides the sense of mass of the building and presents an ever-changing reflection of the environment and people’'s activities as the most vivid expression of the building. This reflective façade also creates the illusion of a wide site and extends the originally cramped space. The interior space of the building has been opened up as much as possible; the vertical traffic is reconstructed and a large number of spaces are endowed with multiple attributes in order to create as many opportunities as possible for people to meet each other.