THE CLOUD TOWN CONVENTION AND EXHIBITION CENTER (PHASE II),HANGZHOU,CHINA

Today in China, almost every city has a grand convention and exhibition center, which requires the support of a huge amount of urban resources. However, even the busiest exhibition centers merely have a usage rate of 40%, meaning that they lie idle at least 200 days a year. On the flip side, the inertial thinking and typical characters of traditional exhibition centers make them hard to be utilized in any other ways, causing a huge waste of resources invisibly. As such, we start to question ourselves: is it possible to facilitate ordinary people’s life on the premise of fulfilling the original functions of an exhibition center? Can higher resource utilization rate be achieved, by sharing the same body with other types of urban public facilities or by integration of some sorts? Therefore, we first decided to reduce this 66,000 square meters huge building to merely 6.6 meters high, presenting a large roof covered with green space, without any shape, people will not even think that it is a building. A large number of gentle slopes are set around the building, making the whole roof coverinng look like the natural continuation of the ground. The design hopes to return all the sites occupied by the building to the public in a more interesting way of "3D park". In the past, the "keep people away" image of the grand exhibition center could not be found here.People can easily walk to the roof through the grass slope,and the grass slope itself will also attract people to rest and stay.The roof is not only a park, but also includs a football field, watchtower, sandpit, theater, roller skating platform, community vegetable garden, mobile cabin, "jumping grid" and other kinds of interesting facilities, which are connected by a winding and undulating "air runway".A large number of hidden interfaces are also left under the grass slope, where people can "plug in" the lawn as long as they have new and more interesting ideas, just like ‘lego’, so that the building and the activities happening here can develop freely.Through the composite superposition of space and different functions, the indoor exhibition hall will be immediately transformed into the "Sports-Warehouse" of the town when there is no exhibition. The great openness, complexity and civic design make this originally single convention and exhibition center become the first civic park and gymnasium of the town, attracting a large number of citizens to come here for sports, rest and play every day, thus increasing the chance of meeting each other.In addition, a variety of spontaneous community activities such as concerts, football matches, carnivals and marathons have been held in the town, which have injected new vitality into the town and become a must-see for residents in their daily life.This design is a re-thinking and bold attempt of the design paradigm of such large urban public buildings, aiming to make the huge urban resources behind such urban public buildings play a greater public value.

Lead Architect:Ma Di
Design Team:Jin Xin,Mao Lianping,Jiang Sheng,Zhang Jialiang,Shen Weifen,Wang yang,Mao Mengjun