Articles by Collin Chen

Cultural backgrounds: Rural Revitalization, Rural Construction and Human Intervention – Modern society has released people from the contract with their land, and the human heart is no longer bound to the earth. When people are no longer attached to the land for granted, villages face the dilemma of what shall it use to grow and retain people. With the rapid development of cities, the countryside has become a selfless supplier of production factors such as land resources and human capital. Those villages that are not rich in arable land, like Beigou Village, can only export young and middle-aged labor to the outside world. This loss of population desertified the land and dilapidated dwellings. What cannot be bypassed in revitalizing the countryside is to reverse this one-way flow of people from the village to the city, allowing people to return from the city to the village, whether it is for short-term consumption or long-term living and working.

Built on the riverside terrace, Fire Bird Tower is a central installation for the 2022 New Year’s celebration at Yangshuo Sugar House, which will be set ablaze to welcome the new year. The site, where the installation is located, was once a dock for the old sugar factory to deliver goods and is now the space of the Sugar House facing Li River, making it an iconic place.

Built on the riverside terrace of Yangshuo Sugar House, White Bloom Tower is a central installation for the 2023 New Year’s celebration to be set ablaze to welcome the new year. The site, where the installation is located, was once a dock for the old sugar factory to deliver goods and is now the space of the Sugar House facing the Li River landscape, thus making it an iconic place. After burning in the New Year celebration in 2023, White Bloom Tower will be rebuilt on the hill enclosed by the hotel, standing in the woods as if it is part of them.

Built on the riverside terrace of Yangshuo Sugar House, Fire Pit Tower is a central installation for the 2021 New Year’s celebration, which will begin with a burning ceremony to welcome the new year. The installation is located on a site that was once a dock for the old sugar factory to deliver goods, and is now the space facing the landscape of Li River, making it an iconic place. After burning during the New Year’s celebration in 2021, Fire Pit Tower will be rebuilt and permanently preserved on the Sugar House grounds, guiding people from the hotel’s main building to Li River bank at an axially turning point of the site.

B&B and Games. At the end of 2020, near the Great Wall at Shuiguan in Huairou, Beijing, we designed three projects for Xiaoxi B&B simultaneously, perhaps it is more appropriate to call them rural hotels than B&Bs. I have designed and run such hotels before, and I would love to have a unique living experience of “breaking away from daily life” and a lifestyle of “here and now”. Architecture, as a carrier of this conception, is not a “home building” in the first place, for it holds little real life and memory of the owner, instead it resembles a “theme park” with the characteristics above, a reciprocating game between reality and fantasy. Since it is a game, there must be rules. The owner’s requirements are simple: to keep the characters of the three existing houses. And we will make up the rules.

In 2019, Studio YUDA and Studio NOR were invited by the Shanghai University of Sport and Shanghai Century Publishing (Group) Co., Ltd to design the first sports-themed bookstore in Shanghai, “Lvwa Sports Bookstore”. Facing the base in the original rough state, the only spatial idea put forward by the owner is to make full use of the skylight atrium with a height of 17 meters to “build a landmark”. This requirement, which usually only appears at the urban scale, not only clarified the core of the design but also changed the main extension direction of the bookstore space with only one floor from horizontal to vertical, sowing the seeds for our later formal concept.