Category B-1 Honorable Mention

Category B-1: Public Amenity Commercial Buildings    
Honorable Mention

Award credit: Dansheng Dong
Location: Hangzhou, China
Photography: Zhao Qiang
 

In China’s continuous promotion of the industrialization of architecture, an unconventional rapid construction mode based on prefabricated systems has gradually become a market mainstream. Unfortunately, industrialized constructions are often regarded as being synonymous with un-refinement and inferior quality, thereby calling for thoughtful design ideas to truly and effectively express the poetry of architecture. 

This project focuses on Building 81, one of the buildings in the Zitown headquarters of the Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University Co., Ltd (UAD), which was jointly developed by the government of Xihu District in Hangzhou, China, and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. As one of the demonstrative prefabricated architecture projects selected by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China in 2019, this building chalks a prefabricated rate of up to 85 percent and an assembly rate of up to 96.8 percent.  It has also been rated as a national Class-3A prefabricated building and a three-star green building. 

The key in the design of this building is found in the balance between technology, art, and nature. The building unveils the interpretation of poetic construction: here, architectural design is no longer about purely rational thinking or perceptual output, and any technical decision or creation of perceptual experience is based on both sense and sensibility. This project shows that rational construction is not constrained by technology, but instead emphasizes the poetry of industrialization, breaking the preconception that the public has about prefabricated architecture as being rough, crude, and cold.