Community

The Cultural Service Center and Special Workshops in Ruyi Village, Shuikou Town, which was designed by the local studio led by Chunyu Wei, is located in Shuikou Town, Jianghua Yao Autonomous County. The town was located in the flooded area of the tearful river reservoir expansion project, but now it is located in an area surrounded by longitudinal mountains and relatively flat.

Located in a new financial town in the suburb of Shenyang, this planned 5,000 square meters community center belongs to a commercial plot that will house 50,000 square meters of future development. Our program research discovered two disadvantages: 1. this newly developing area does not have sufficient population to support large quantities of retails; 2. It is very questionable how to make a typical shopping center competitive. After a discussion with the client, we both agreed that this commercial center should be something special. Thus came the idea of using a botanic garden to energize the space. The client was very much excited about the proposal and commissioned URBANUS to design the entire 50,000 square meters project, rather than a singular community center. After analyzing various potential commercial models in this area, an innovative layout appeared: a greenhouse was employed as the center of all programs to attract visitors and start-up businesses.

The village’s community center and Jacqueline Auriol’s school system are stretching in the heart of Saint Herblain; The idea of the municipality to renovate them demonstrates the strong desire to perfect the image of its city heart, through a real architectural and landscape response for its public facilities. The multiplicity of the buildings that make up the project and their period of construction reveal a lack of overall coherence. We then focused on bringing new momentum to the whole so that the equipment would benefit from a new dynamic.

How to wake up the whole community by micro-updates or a catalyst is the key point. And then next is how to make the street corner bring more energy. After a long time of carefully planning and rounds of tough negotiations, an Asian Games Village neighborhood community office was finally decided to transform this place into, construct a Winter Olympic home for the people, and build a beautiful community office for Beijing. Its position serves as a start point to show the courage to change! The old exhibition hall should be changed into a brand new building, which is a gorgeous turn of the street corner, by the means of low cost, light intervention, and easy construction. It would no longer be the traditional street office of gatehouse style and window hall, but the center of community life in the new era, where the people can come in, see inside, and participate happily!

New children’s house inspired by and built in the forest. Right next to a protected forest in Jutland, the Danish architects GinnerupArkitekter have designed a children’s house inspired by the surrounding scenery. An inspiration that has manifested itself in both the specific design of the house and its use of sustainable materials and in the way the architecture supports children’s everyday life, both indoors and outdoors.

Etampes Town Hall wants to build a new community center for the Croix de Vernailles neighborhood, a modern urban area built in the 1960s on top of a hill up north of the city center. The existing facilities are dispersed all over three different buildings in the neighborhood making it very difficult to create a cohesive social project. Moreover, in recent years, the neighborhood has seen a dramatic increase in population making the existing spaces too small.

The Orly area, known mainly for its airport activities, is above all an inhabited district. The site seems to be a place apart, belonging both to the great landscape of the airport and to the intimacy of this fringe of the city, composed of a suburban fabric and logistics buildings.

Conceived as a pavilion for community dialogue on nature, food and farming, the Green Agora allows native plants to grow on its modular aluminum structure and steel meshes. Located at Ground-Up Initiative’s Kampong Kampus since the 2020 Singapore Archifest, the pavilion activates everyday spaces in the community to meet food production needs at the neighborhood scale.