Articles by Collin Chen

Repression and Rebirth: A Christian Minority in a Typical Chinese City
Since its construction in 1938 Huaxiang Church became witness to radical transformations: From decades of deterioration to unprecedented urban growth; from complete suppression of religion to a ten-fold growth in the number of Christians. Today, it finds itself in a maze of high-rises. In need for additional space, its congregation decided to build a community centre adjacent to the church.

The project lies in the birthland of characteristic towns——Cloud Town, Hangzhou. For actively embracing imagination, a once unfinished industrial park has now become the industrial hub of cloud computing, big-data and artificial intelligence. The ‘Computing Conference’ held in autumn every year has become the largest-scale scientific and technological fiesta. Oddly enough, the conference was held outdoors several years in a roll simply because of the ‘impropriety’ of available venues. Of course, by no means does ‘impropriety’ suggest those venues were inferior in terms of size or grade, it’s just that the conference founders didn’t want to see people’s imagination being constrained by a venue. Therefore, as the designers of the exhibition center, we intended to break away from past experience and the ‘desire to create’, contemplating and making breakthroughs from its origin instead of constructing yet another generic exhibition center on this land.

The context of this golf course boasts invaluable natural assets such as abundant sunshine, green hills, lush grass, mature trees, exotic boulders and pristine lake views.

The origin
Sun Township is located in the heart of the scenic area of Dabie mountain in Huoshan county, Anhui Province. To support the travel industry, the local government had commissioned our team to design a square and a parking lot here. When the field engineering was almost finished, only a small temple had not been tear down completely yet. Such a small temple for the God of Wealth is quite common in surrounding rural area, it did not catch any attention therefore luckily it was not removed.

With its MINI LIVING Urban Cabin at the House Vision China, MINI demonstrates how to potentially achieve maximum quality of living within a minimum space. At House Vision China MINI presents the MINI LIVING Urban Cabin in Beijing. The micro-apartment concept was developed for the fair in collaboration with Chinese architect Sun Dayong (Co-founding partner of penda) .

The space is located in Lishui, Zhejiang, the interior area of whose top office building is about 2300 square meters. It belongs to a space design collected business office and reception hall. The owners hope to set the local history archway in the center of the space as a manifestation of corporate culture, while showing the respect of the owners on the traditional context as a modern technology company. The starting point of design is also around the history archway to extend design.

The Gusu Aristo Villa located at the center area of Suzhou, next to the Surging Wave Pavilion, which is a very traditional area in the city center. The culture environment provides this project a classic undertone.

Located at the entrance of the entire village, this house is the first building in sight when entering this ancient Huizhou village. This tiny sweet piece of architecture was originally used as a small pharmacy store with an area of only 80㎡. In order to receive growing number of tourists, we renovated her into a reception center for the entire village. The design requirements are simple: in order to coordinate with the overall environment, it’s not allowed to be bigger, taller or abrupt. However, she still needs to bear the iconic role of the entire ancient village at the entrance spot.