Articles by Collin Chen

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.

Dongfengyun Art Town, where the Art Center is located, is on the outskirts of Miele City, Yunnan Province, about an hour’s drive from Kunming, the Provincial Capital. Since 2014, Luo Xu, an artist from Yunnan Province, has created a series of sculptural installations such as “Kaleidoscope” and “Half A Cloud”, as well as large and small clusters of tile kilns built of red bricks, which have constituted an unrestrained exotic world with the red boundless Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and rugged mountains. The Art Town, which covers an area of about 1.6 square kilometers, is well known to people.

The asset management company occupies an entire floor of a super high-rise office building in Lujiazui. The team is composed of mathematicians and engineers. The founder hopes to set aside half of the floor area as public space for meetings and activities. The space is expected to have a sense of technology and an academic atmosphere. The project tries to explore a light and calm atmosphere different from the popular office mode that emphasize dynamic and color. Space quality is achieved through a subtle material palette and precise detail.

A rest station for a vista – Sitting in the mountains, the building is a rest station for bikers that is located at the highest spot of a cycle track. Towards the north there is potentially a broad, open view, which is currently blocked by trees at eye height, so we hoped to create a rest station that visitors could ascend and enjoy the vista. We have imagined how bikers will arrive at the rest station after a long ride: first, they will enter a corridor, park their bikes at the entrance, and take a break. For those with more curiosity or finding the cycle track tedious, they can explore further into the corridor that spirals up to the top of the mountain, where they can enjoy a splendid vista of the surrounding mountains.

We used to look up at the stars, remembering the love and hate of interstellar life through time and space, intertwined in the dark cosmic forest of spinning and flickering ……