The architecture of the Guangxi senior center departs from the humanistic aspect of the project. The design creates a space for retirees who spent most of their youth in the Cultural Revolution. Despite historic impacts, the “communal life” created in the Cultural Revolution has always been the most significant recollection of the time. The sense of belonging in an era of uncertainty offers a critic to the isolation and apathy of modernity.
Our project tries to evoke that sense of belonging for our parents’ generation and generations to come. With farming being the theme in “communal life”, the nature ground is where their collective memory based upon. Our space of resemblance is constructed through the manipulation of ground. In the urban scale, the site situates at the expending edge of urbanization. It confronts a higher datum of the preserved nature and a lower datum of the new developments. Our project reconciles the extremes in topography by creating a transition between the two through a series of shifting horizontal plates. In the architecture scale, we reinterpret the topography as a multi-level ground plane, with the underground space folds into the street level, and extend vertically into the second floor. As the ground plane keeps folding up, it forms the upper stories. We use a wood grain aluminum louver system to bring the drastic landscape to the interior, as a way to respond to the indigenous bamboo framing typology.
Client: Bureau of Retired Veteran Cadres in Guangxi
Urban Construction Investment Group Co., Ltd. of Guangxi
Architects: Atelier Alter
Location: Intersection between Yunjing Road and Yuewan Road, Nanning, Guangxi
Principals in charge: Xiaojun Bu, Yingfan Zhang
Project Architect: Wenming Pan, Ping Jiang, Guanghong Qiu
Design Team: Maoxian Huang, Qiang Zeng, Zhenwei Li, Kai Qin
Local Architect: Guangxi Institute of Building Research & Design
Civil/Structure/MEP Engineer: Guangxi Institute of Building Research & Design
Landscape Architect: Guangxi Institute of Building Research & Design
General Contractor: Guangxi Metallurgical Construction Company, Guangxi Construction Group Fifth Construction Engineering LLC.
Cost: $12,967,440
Area: 17576.71 SF
Year: 2014
Photographs: Courtesy of Atelier Alter
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