Community

Two separate outmoded buildings were used for decades before this new child and family center arrived in Mulgrave, Melbourne. One built around the 1960s was used by preschool children (ages three and four), while the 1930s building, once a detached house, focused on maternal health. But with new families with younger children settling into the area, it was time for the City of Monash, to look to the future. Designed by AOA Christopher Peck, the new child and family center not only embraces the corner site but was conceived around two established eucalypts, one now a focus of the center.

The Kamwokya Community Centre is the fruit of a partnership between the local non-profit Kamwokya Christian Caring Community, which runs sports, leisure, and artistic activities in one of the poorest areas of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and the Ameropa Foundation, which works internationally on projects that aim to improve the lives of marginalized communities.

Music and festivities play a fundamental role in Nacajuca´s daily life, both in the Mesoamerican-rooted pochó dance and in contemporary manifestations.

Re-generation: Resilience in Rural Residence. Zhu Feng Village is a famous Zhi-Qing village in Shangyu city, Zhejiang Province, with a unique Zhi-Qing culture. As early as 1965, Zhu Feng Village welcomed the first batch of Zhi-Qing to settle here, followed by four more batches in 1973, 1974, 1976, and 1977. Since 2020, under the commission of XiaGuan Town, Zhi-Qing Memory Museum For-All, Zhi-Qing Dining Hall For-All, and Zhi-Qing Medical Station For-All, these small cultural facilities transformed from village residences have been gradually designed and built. As a public cultural activity space open to the whole society, the design is a subtle intervention of the renovated building group into the original village settlement with a renewal strategy on a microscopic scale. This concept is mainly based on the following two aspects. On the one hand, although the construction process of preserving and renovating rural dwellings was expected to be particularly difficult, the design continues the scale of rural dwellings as far as possible, retaining some of the original elements, and flexibly transforming them from private to the public through the reorganization of internal spaces and functions. On the other hand, the owner’s strict control of the construction schedule dictates that the finalization of spaces and details needs to be carried out on-site in collaboration with a number of craftsmen. It is important to consider both the cost and the integration of old and new elements.

The project is located in a corner of the Xiannv Lake Nature Reserve on the southwestern side of Xinyu City, Jiangxi Province, away from the hustle and bustle of the city and surrounded by hills, woods, fields, and a lake. The nature experience center is part of the overall resort design, providing visitors with nature experiences, public services, and a pristine living experience. The main design challenge was to achieve the function of a large volume of buildings while preserving the landscape and maintaining a low-intensity development of the natural ground.

Located in an old, industrial corridor, where a powerplant once stood, the Changchun Community Sports Complex is helping residents, old and new, reimagine life in their changing neighborhoods.

PILARES are small neighborhood hubs that provide social, educational, and cultural infrastructure to residents of Mexico City. An initiative implemented by the Mayor of Mexico City, these Points of Innovation, Freedom, Art, Education, and Knowledge (PILARES, for its acronym in Spanish), provide local residents access to computers and internet, workshop spaces (carpentry, silk-screen printing, dark room, etc.) and flexible rooms for public gatherings. More than 250 PILARES are planned for Mexico City, and a small part of those were commissioned to architects with a distinguished trajectory.

Yunzhai Village of Changyuan City in Henan Province, where the project is located, is an ordinary village with typical features of rural area in Central China. During the past decades, the villagers’ well-being has been drastically improved thanks to social development, but a series of social problems emerged, too. For example, the outflow of labor resulted in hollowness in local demographic structure; the traditional bonds of families and neighbors been weakened, with problems of ageing and left-behind children remaining unsolved. Correspondingly, public ritual spaces here, either waning or disappearing, are in dire need of reconstruction. As a result, the village decided to build a community center for public gatherings.