ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN & RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF SCUT CO., LTD: Runner of World Design Awards 2024. The project is situated in the Cultural and Creative Town of Tangkou Old Market, Kaiping City, Guangdong Province, China. It stands as a pivotal point within Kaiping’s 30-kilometer rural revitalization demonstration belt which is described as “Charming Overseas Chinese Hometown with World Heritage Flair”. Leveraging the cultural depth and resource advantages of neighboring World Heritage sites such as “Liyuan Garden” and the “Zili Village” watchtower clusters and traditional villages, the area has vigorously promoted rural revitalization through a series of renovation and revitalization projects in Tangkou Old Market, fostering the comprehensive and vigorous development of emerging industries like tourism, leisure, homestays, cultural and creative enterprises, and specialty agriculture.

1.2 Site Conditions

The site is selected within the former Tangkou Township Government Compound, which has been vacant for years. It spans approximately 5.5 hectares in an irregular trapezoidal shape. This location marks the transitional boundary between the market town and the countryside: the old market center locates in the west and north sides, characterized by the dense streets and mixed buildings, and is undergoing continuous transformation towards commercial and cultural tourism functions, with ongoing infrastructure and development projects. The east and south sides, however, unfold into vast farmlands crisscrossed by waterways, lush forests, rolling hills, and scattered watchtowers and villages, presenting a serene landscape of the Wuyi waterside countryside. Notably, a large pond and waterfront green space immediately adjacent to the eastern side of the site will undergo comprehensive renovation in the later stages.

1.3 Preserved Buildings

The site retains three former township government office buildings constructed in the early 1990s, featuring reinforced concrete frame structures with heights ranging from three to five stories. These buildings, however, suffer from structural aging and wall damage. As typical outer-corridor slab buildings in southern rural areas, they possess small-unit spaces in terms of plan layout and column grid structures. Considering factors such as functional adaptability, cost, and construction duration, the majority of the project will be realized through the renovation of these preserved buildings. While the overall volume and form of the preserved buildings are modest and lack distinct highlights, they retain distinctive features of local architecture from the 1990s in exterior details like concrete window grids, water-washed stone balustrades, and colorful mosaic flowerbeds. Due to the limitations in plan and structure, some larger-span spaces will require expansion, primarily on the eastern vacant land resulting from the demolition of existing facilities like signal towers and warehouses, located within the site’s interior and constrained by its shape.

1.4 Functional Configuration

The project boasts a total gross floor area of about 6,000 ㎡, primarily comprising a training center (including the township Party school) and an ancillary hotel (Tangxin Hotel). The training center provides various educational and training spaces for different groups such as governments and enterprises, while the hotel not only serves the training activities but also operates in the market under the management of a hospitality group. The establishment of a municipal-level training center in a local town aims to use the overall environment of the cultural and creative town and even the renovated buildings themselves as demonstrative materials for rural revitalization. Hence, apart from fulfilling basic service functions and management requirements, the project also emphasizes its public use orientation for external display and open experiences.

1. Design Strategy: Reshaping the Place Between Ring Hills

Based on the site conditions of the preserved buildings and construction land, the overall layout naturally divides into three zones: a standalone preserved building along the street in the northwest serves as the training building, including classrooms, studios, and offices; an expanded multi-functional auditorium, exhibition hall, and entrance hall for training facilities located closely in the northeast, adopting compact dimensions and shapes to optimize land use, such as the auditorium’s elliptical plan closely hugging the site boundary. In the southwest, two interconnected preserved buildings along the street are transformed into the hotel, with the first floor expanded towards the east and north to accommodate a Chinese restaurant and hotel lobby.

The design adopts a continuous landform architecture form – “Ring Hills” – as the solution, serving as a link between interior and exterior spaces and between old and new buildings. Rising along the site boundaries and encircling the area, the “Ring Hills” unfold like a scrolling painting, connecting the three zones and defining the central plaza and open space facing the pond. It endeavors to forge a fused boundary between the building group and its surroundings, reestablishing the site’s public connectivity within the cultural and creative town. By fully exploiting existing resources, it creates a collage-like formal language, fostering a novel cultural and tourism node in the village.

Project Details:-
Firm
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN & RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF SCUT CO., LTD

Architect
Xiaoxin He, Ping Su

Project Name
Reconstruction of Jiangmen Rural Revitalization Training Center

Project Category
Mixed-Use Built

Team
Xiaoxin He, Ping Su (Principal Designers) ; Lin Lin, Han Zhang, Jing Fan, Lu Jiang, Yanbin Zhang, Chuncui Lai (Architecture and Interior Design Team) ; Zhaohui Wu, Shuyin Feng (Landscape Design Team)

Project Location
Kaiping City, China

Country
China

Photography ©Credit
Alpha Photography (Lin Zou, Qinfang Liao)

The ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN & RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF SCUT CO., LTD, founded in 1979, is a renowned Class-A design and research institute in China and one of the earliest established such institutions within key universities. With a staff of over a thousand employees, it boasts robust technical prowess, with over half of its technical personnel holding master’s degrees or higher.

Through more than 40 years of practice, the Institute has cultivated several flagship design segments, including cultural and exposition buildings, educational architecture, super high-rise buildings, sports venues, convention and exhibition centers, residential housing, transportation facilities, etc.

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