Revitalized：Meiya Community Center

天津城建大学

Project idea

After learning that I needed to complete a project to renovate an old building, I searched for many cases and found that the design forms related to the renovation of old buildings were quite similar. The newly built parts of the building were always placed together indiscriminately with the old parts, but I found that I had never seen any design that separated the old and new spaces, allowing people to shuttle between them, that is, pushing open a door, It completely changed the scene, isn't this spatial experience very interesting? So, this spatial effect became the initial goal of my design.


However, this design is also very distinctive in its final form. The exploration of architectural logic comes from my sketches, especially the composition of some straight lines and a circle. The straight line comes from the original column connection of the factory, and the circle comes from my imagination of the type of community activity center. This picture directly incubated the entire subsequent design.

Project description

The project site is located in an abandoned factory area which is next to Meiya Creative Industry Park in Xiqing District, Tianjin, China. （You can see the site in my project’s last three photos. I have witnessed that the excavator dismantled the plant A at the time when I took the last photo.）

The course requires us to design new buildings using the original structure of the abandoned factory. This is an old building renovation and utilization project.


I designed a circular community activity center on this site. Instead of taking the structure of the old factory building as a frame to design in its interior, I used the columns of the old factory building to cut the circular volume, which is highly symbolic and Signedness. In the gap cut out by the new building, there is a museum space that is used to commemorate the history of the workshop here. People shuttle between various blocks in the community activity center, constantly entering the museum space symbolizing old buildings from the newly built space, and entering the new community activity space from the symbolizing old space. I hope this will be a unique experience.

Technical information

This community activity center is a frame structure building supported by numerous columns, with an arc-shaped beam connecting the entire building to ensure overall structural consistency.

It is worth mentioning that on the floor plan, there are two columns at the entrance hall that are not filled in black. In fact, they are not part of the load-bearing system. They are retained to balance the visual perception of the building's form, as the hall is located outside the building, and it appears that the cantilever plate supports a large block above. If there is only one column below, it will appear unbalanced.

On the inner side of the building, a layer of rusty metal plates is wrapped around the outer wall. In order to prevent damage to the insulation performance of the building, there is actually a 120mm gap between them and the outer wall.