SEU-ARCH & Zhengzhong International: Winner of World Design Awards 2024. Mafuyuan Tourist Center is located at the entrance of Mafuyuan Village which is a typical small village in the suburbs of Nanjing City in China. It is renovated from two existing vacant two-story brick-concrete structures normal rural houses, and aims to provide more public space with new functions for the local people.

Mafuyuan Village has good natural resources and a rich historical rural culture. In the beginning, we paid more attention to the decline of surrounding villages caused by the rapid urbanization process of metropolises and took the Mafuyuan Tourist Center as an opportunity to optimize the situation of population loss, cultural decline, vacant houses, lack of infrastructure and so on. The project aims to promote rural revitalization and improve villagers’ lives and revive the rural culture. In the view of spatial structure and typology, we think about how to represent local rural objects in the village to keep the cultural memory with controllable cost and the combination of local technology.

Concerning the approach of these two rural buildings’ renovation. Firstly, connecting in the air. Two buildings are connected through a corridor on the second floor to create an indoor platform for connecting functional spaces and viewing. Secondly, courtyard in between. We reorganize the public spaces between the buildings to provide a shared courtyard for the villagers. Thirdly, seeds for the memory, the building takes seeds as the main theme into the spatial organization with a seed window, and the landscape settings around the building are combined with seed-related objects to remind the rural daily life with normal agricultural production in modern way.

Mafuyuan Tourist Center can be seen as an attempt to renovate ordinary Chinese villages with suburban and agricultural elements to keep the memory and life in the village and reproduce the spirit of the rural place.

Project Details:-
Firm
SEU-ARCH & Zhengzhong International

Architect
ZHU Yuan

Project Name
Mafuyuan Tourist Center

Project Category
Public Building Built

Team
ZHU Yuan, SUN Yuan, LIU Yan, FAN Cheng, LIU Wenjun, FAN Tianlei, JI Wenjuan, ZHOU Shunyun, ZHANG Huaping

Project Location
Mafuyuan Village, Jiangning District, Nanjing City

Country
China

Photography ©Credit
HOU Bowen

Zhu Yuan, male, Doctor of Engineering, professor, school of architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing, CHINA, expert member in expert database of Architectural Society of China, Vice Di of Residential Architecture Society of Architectural Society of China. Winner of the Young Architect Award of the Architectural Society of China, winner of National Outstanding doctoral dissertation. Since 2010, he has been teaching at Southeast University. He has been a visiting scholar at K.U Leuven, Lehigh University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include rural planning and architectural design, and architectural design under the background of urban renewal.

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