Xiangcheng District Planning Exhibition Hall / Lacime Architects

Architects: Lacime Architects
Location: East of Suzhou North Railway Station, Nantiancheng Road, Suzhou, China
Architect In Charge: Hu Cheng
Design Team: Dezhen Kong, Zhihao Jin
Area: 6030.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Shengliang Su, Qilin Zhang

Interior Design: Quan Huang, G-Art Design
Interior Designer: Quan Huang
Client: Futureland Group

Text description provided by the architects. Suzhou is a cultural city with history of more than 2500 years. It not only creates rich material wealth-being for the Chinese nation, but also writes a brilliant chapter about the excellent traditional culture. Suzhou has the reputation of the most majestic scenery in the southeast China, also its architecture is featured as “Elegance and Grace”.

Planning Exhibition Hall is located in the east of Suzhou North Railway Station, which is an open base, south to Nantiancheng Road, east to Chengyang Road and north of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway. It covers an area of 1.17 hectares with 6030㎡floorage .

Nearly billions of passengers flow through Suzhou North Railway Station every year. When the high-speed train slows down before entering the station, this exhibition hall could be visible at a glance! The advantage of site location determines its uniqueness. Each visible facade of architecture is very important. We carried out researches in two ways; one is the garden type, some enclosed elements are applied in space constraints to achieve orderly space change. Obviously, it is difficult for garden-style to achieve the meaning carried by the building, so we adapted another way that setting a point to make it a whole without scatter, let it become a city landmark and visual focus!

We aimed to design a simple and powerful shape for the building and hope this square can reveal the profound meaning of “confidence” for the owners, the government and all those who work for the high-speed rail new town project. The outer curtain wall is composed of vertical components, which has the elegant and dynamic effect and is implied “the Curtain Rises”.

The height of the building is particularly important, so we set the height of the building in line with those on the high-speed rail. With height fixed, length and width will be determined to be 46 meters in proportion to the column span and other factors. The outer appearance is made up of aluminium square rods. The standard segments comprised of the outer appearance size and spacing corresponds strictly to the column net. Each rod is divided into five equal parts and its inner side is treated with dark lines and its end side is treated with curling to make the building more flexible and soft.

As for landscape, we emphasize on the application of the waterscape to ensure the full reflection by setting the road leading to the main entrance of the building on the side. The elegant curved profile of the building is inverted in the water, which is very charming. The image of the outer appearance is conceived from a musical instrument called Marimba. The building is solidified music. We hope that this small building can play the splendid music against the water sky.