VANKE SALES PAVILION


Project Description:

The project takes the planning principle of a Chinese courtyard house with an entry court, front garden, a main pavilion, side pavilion with support facilities and a back garden that leads to the show flats exhibition area.

Inspired by traditional Chinese paper cutting, a cast fibre cement lattice screen with a Chinese motif as a sun screen wraps the exterior of the pavilion, giving the building a translucent outer skin, letting in soft, diffused daylight into the building interior.  The same cement screen is used as a landscape element in the entry court, framing the landscape gardens and giving a stark contrast to the white washed garden walls and green vegetation.  Water features are used as part of the landscape element to create reflection ponds for the pavilion, which becomes a very dramatic feature at night.

Taking the concept of a Chinese courtyard house, the sales pavilion is a simple post and beam structure with a glazed courtyard in the middle above the model display.  The same exterior architectural articulation is carried to inside the pavilion.  Here the cement screens are replaced by timbre screens of the same scale, creating a continuity between the inside and outside spaces.

The project was extremely fast track, as many China projects are, taking about eight months from start of design to move in.  With such a tight schedule a lot of close coordination with the client and contractor was necessary and the design needs to be quite simple.