Community Center as a Vessel for Life
The city of Chongqing is located in the central part of China and is the largest in size among the four Chinese administrative units of this category. It is surrounded by three mountain chains from the south, north and east sides and is characterized by a hilly landscape. The climate of the place is distinguished by relatively high rainfall level, high humidity level and short mild winters and hot summers. The main place of interest in Chongqing is not a monument or a museum, but its stunningly beautiful scenery. People come here to enjoy the majestic mountains, caves, meadows, parks, gorges, canyons, colorful waterfalls and to improve their health in the hot springs.
Of course also architecture in such a place requires a certain respect for the landscape and yet another feature of the city are numerous buildings literally merged into the mountains. During the nights in the twinkling colored lights they transform into a very romantic landscape. Naturally as in any Chinese city, due to a catastrophic shortage of land and forced design of high-rise buildings, houses here are not always harmonious with the environment, but there are also some positive examples such as the new community center on the outskirts of the city built on the border between the Taoyuan park and the residential quarter by the project of architectural company Vector Architects (Gong Dong), which became known around the world almost immediately after its implementation.
Vector Architects office by the standards of the architectural world is quite young and was established in year of 2008 in Beijing. Despite the relatively recent coming up on the architectural scene, they have showed themselves as specialists sensitive to the context. Architects always emphasize that “good architecture is like a tree that has a clear structure whose elements are details like the branches and leaves, and it is based on a very stable as a root concept.”
Even in contemporary Chinese design industry, encouraging rapid construction and ongoing commitment in height, often resembling a non-stop stream of the factory, Vector Architects treat architecture differently and consider buildings as kind of vessels for life, which in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, determine the daily lives of users. Architects show by their works that each project has to be developed individually for the certain place following the history of it, the climate, the way of life of residents and not to be a foreign element, as it happens often in cases of the “star” architects projects.
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Text: Elizaveta Klepanova
Illustrative materials provided by VECTOR ARCHITECTS
Photo: © Su Shengliang и Xiaokai Ma