Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2022
West Suburban Elegance Display Center
- A' Design Award 2022 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2022
- CLIENT: Shanghai PTArchitects
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 25,984
- Verification code 6113AAB5EC · Verify this award
About West Suburban Elegance Display Center
West Suburban Elegance is a display center in Sijing Town, Shanghai, China. Sijing has a history of more than a thousand years, and the design follows the local settlement form to create a rich sequence of spaces. Small scattered volumes echo the surrounding residential texture, while flat and sloped roofs are combined to vary the ceiling height. Corridors, courtyards, water, stone and planting are arranged with traditional garden techniques and a modern architectural language. The building covers a floor area of 600 square meters on a site of 3,300 square meters.
This architectural composition exemplifies the refined sensibilities of contemporary commercial architecture, where material honesty and spatial poetry converge to create environments that transcend mere function. The display center, recognized with a Golden A' Design Award, demonstrates how carefully orchestrated relationships between built form, landscape, and light can establish a distinctive sense of place and invitation. The designer appears to engage deeply with principles of phenomenological architecture, crafting sequences of experience that unfold as visitors move from the expansive plaza through the curated threshold of the perforated screen and into the intimate garden court. The juxtaposition of the stone-clad volume's weighty permanence against the louvered structure's apparent lightness and permeability suggests sophisticated thinking about how architecture can simultaneously shelter and reveal, enclose and connect. Particularly noteworthy is the integration of landscape elements as active architectural partners rather than mere ornamental additions—the sculptural tree becomes a focal point of contemplation, its organic branching patterns offering visual counterpoint to the precise geometries surrounding it, while the flowing groundcover forms echo the curvilinear screen, creating formal resonances across different scales and materials. The evening capture reveals how the design anticipates and celebrates the transformation of spaces through changing light conditions, with interior illumination emanating warmth that draws visitors inward while the building masses appear to float against the deepening sky. This work invites consideration of how commercial architecture might elevate everyday experiences of visiting, browsing, and encountering designed objects into moments of aesthetic appreciation and spatial awareness.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The project is positioned at the root of Shanghai, Sijing Town, Sijing with a history of more than a thousand years. With a view to continue the local language and respect traditional Sijing culture, the design wholly adopts the settlement form to present rich space, leaving the surrounding environment and the building as a borrowed landscape from each other, meanwhile, with modern approaches to restore the traditional space, it gives visitors a modern garden space experience.
- Tags
- display center, modern garden space experience
- Production Technology
- The application of spatial streamline is based on the unique gardening techniques of Suzhou gardens, creating a rich space for enjoyment, play and living in a limited space. Moreover, the corridor, garden, courtyard, building, spring, stone, flowers, wood together has been combined by means of comparison, setoff, opposite scenery, borrowed landscape, scale changes, level coordination, small in the big, less prior to more, and other techniques and a harmonious living environment of man and nature has been created in the city.
- Design Challenge
- The project covers a land area of 3,300㎡ and a floor area of 600㎡. How to use the limited building volume to present a rich spatial feeling and visiting experience on the site is the breakthrough point of this design.
Designers hope to create as much great effective space as possible. Entering the display center through the Mountain Gate, the landscape shadow wall comes into view, then after a grille walkway, we can arrive at the reception area. The reception area and the sandbox area are connected by the water courtyard, which embodies four steps, opening, developing, changing and concluding, and plays an emphasis on the continuity and integrity of spatial design in the real and imaginary, light and dark, opening and closing, turning, gyrating, restraining and displaying, while the enclosed landscape movement line creates different scenery as the footsteps move. With the design of ancient trees and wells, flowing water and other different details, it evokes the memory of hometown and tells the story of oriental culture to people. - Project Duration
- The project started in Dec. 2018 and finished in Dec. 2020 in Shanghai, China.
- Operation Flow
- The design strategy include the following two parts. The first is to keep the original building base texture and massing. The second is that the building style is not a complete imitation of Classical Gardens of Suzhou style but a modern style which expresses the heritage elements with innovative architectural language. Simple sheet walls are adopted at the new entrance facade. Between the walls, concave slope top are used to prompt the renewal of the original roof, while maintaining the original roof trend of the main building.
- Research
- In order to create a real-life scene for "what you see is what you obtain", the design takes the different needs of pre-display and post-use into full consideration, and finally has met the requirements of both functions, avoiding the waste of resources brought by the secondary transformation.
As for the choice of materials, sustainable vitrified materials instead of natural stone are also applied to the design. - Inspiration
- Combined with site characteristics, the overall planning has created juxtaposition clustered space from large to small, thus making the scattered small volumes echo the surrounding residential texture. The ingenious combination of flat and sloped roofs not only creates rich space volume, but also reserves ample floor area and ceiling height.
- Image Credits
- Photo Credits:10 Studio, Qiao Yunfeng, Yuan Yang
Colors of West Suburban Elegance Display Center
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