As a typical picturesque Chinese Jiangnan town, the village of Jijiadun locates about 1.5-hour drive from the central city of Shanghai. With the rapid development of urbanization in China, the problem of rural hollowing-out is becoming increasingly serious. In order to revitalize the village, the government of the local rural township invited a team of professionals to re-develop and renovate the village. By introducing the cultural and creative industries into the village while respecting its rural scene and culture, Jijiadun village is attracting “new villagers” from the cities and thus forming a new dynamic rural living community.
Joseph Dejardin completes the renovation of a 12000sqm former factory building at Chenfeng Group’s Kunshan campus near Shanghai, South China. The design transforms garment production workshops & administrative offices into contemporary fashion studios and flexible office space. As one of China’s largest textile & garment manufacturing companies, the conversion project is part of the studios’s ambitious redevelopment masterplan to transform the factory site into a creative hub for nurturing fashion design in China.
Located at the border of Kunshan City and Shanghai, Chenfeng Group’s 90,000sqm factory campus was set up in 2003. With over 15,000 employees, Chenfeng Group is a certified enterprise of the International Fair Labor Association and a member of the International Sustainable Apparel Coalition. The company is a production partner to international brands including Patagonia, Uniqlo, Stella McCartney, and Chinese fashion designers such as Feng Chen Wang, Xu Zhi and Chen Peng. The group is also a partner in the ready-to-wear brand Comme Moi, founded by former supermodel Lü Yan. Taking advantage of the group’s garment manufacturing expertise, the redevelopment masterplan aims to establish long term collaborations with the country’s top fashion design institutions and internationally renowned young Chinese fashion designers, many of whom already maintain studios on site.
Sited in southeast corner of Yuefeng Island Eco-farm alongside the Yang Cheng Lake, Kunshan，the visitor center consists of a multi-functional activity space, a pet dorm, and a preserved house used as office. Our design task is to explore how architecture should be integrated into such a context, to create a new and unique place, however harmonize with nature.
In the last two decades, Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China has transformed itself from an ancient canal town to a modern industrial city. The west edge of its built-up area is reaching Lake Yangcheng. As the only public space on the lake shore, a park has been constructed. Three pavilions (Buildings B,C,D) were planned in the east area of the park.
With modern buildings increasingly being designed as one large and centralized mass, this design revisited the decentralized model. Catering for senior residents living in the apartments around the park, the community center has a porous exterior appearance which resembles a forest that attracts people to enter.
The 19th-century Chinese cities did not have much consciously planned public space, especially the nodal types such as square and park. People simply used the streets, or whatever left by the traffic flow. The urban renewals brought by the Economic Reform since 1978 have changed Chinese cities completely. However, the renewals have focused on improving the cities’ economic infrastructure. The “non-productive” public space, especially the part serving average residents, has not received proportional attention. So as the first problem, Chinese cities today need more public space quantitatively. But the limited public space already supplied by the urban renewals has also exhibited three quality issues.
This project tries to address a mega problem at a micro scale — Chinese urban residents‘ increasing isolation from nature. Kunshan is in the Yangtze River delta region, a flat land with lots of rainfall. Towns in the region historically developed a unique landscape of crisscross canals and numerous ponds. Traditional buildings were next to or even cantilevered over the canals.
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