Shitang Village Internet Conference Center / AZL

Architects
COMMUNITY
CENTER
NANJING, CHINA
Area: 3000 m²
Year: 2016

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F I R M I TA S

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V E N U S TA S

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Text description provided by the architects. The trend of
modernization and urbanization in  rural development
inevitably requires the introduction of new types of functions.
As multi-functional buildings with large space, the Internet
conference center is one of them. Taking the commune
auditorium and the vegetable greenhouse as the original form, 
Shitang Village Project in Jiangning tries to reconstruct public
buildings in a rural context. Efforts have been made to rapidly
build a system through industrialization, bringing in the
technology of pre-fabricated super slender column structure,
selectively applying suitable technology to eliminate the
existence of weakened and materialized buildings and  restoring
the primitive feeling of rural villages, hence having conducted a
rejuvenated construction practice in an extremely short
construction period of time in rural villages.
1. Big houses in a small town:
The plan of “A small Internet town”of Shitang Village is a
miniature of the township of Chinese countryside, including the
subtle difference and trouble among rural modernization,
township and urbanization, even for those samples with
advantageous geographic conditions and rich natural resources.
Located 40 kilometers to the southwest of Nanjing, this
suburban village has successively completed the village
renovation as planned and the construction of village
accommodation and catering. As the follow-up development of
“beautiful countryside”, in order to meet the multi-functional
needs of conferences and cultural performances resulting from
“A permanent venue for Internet entrepreneurship competition
”in the future, the project of the Internet conference center
proposed by the local government is essential to the future
industrial transformation in the countryside. At the same time,
however, the lack of a process of choosing the venue and
starting the construction through a blue-print planning
demonstrates a certain “spontaneity” of the development of
rural settlement.
2. Re-structuring of types:
Big houses in traditional Chinese countryside are rarely seen.
Typical big houses are “commune auditoruiums” as public
buildings and “green houses” as production facilities. Analysis
of the elements of the above-mentioned two kinds of
“prototypes” has become an important channel for promoting
the design. The types of rural buildings are directly associated
with construction materials and structure. They are either the
material basis of the realistic existence of rural buildings, or
important media of form-oriented demonstration, abstract
spatial imagery of buildings and carriers of cultural experience.
he awakening of the memory of commue auditoriums has
naturally led to the basic spatial elements of dual-slope roofs. In
fact, for most of the time, the big space of this conference
center will also continuously become the venue for villagers to
get together for folk customs. The assembled member-bar
structure is the development of the light steel structure for green
houses. Despite its complexity and reliability higher than the
demands of the latter, its rational construction logic marked by
the least interference against the natural environment is
retained. 
Technology-local rural areas:
Yuan Xin, a structure-oriented engineer in researching the
spatial structure and tensegrity has ingeniously applied the
mechanics principles of tensegrity to the compressed columns
and decomposed the mono-stress of traditional cross-section of
columns into tension and compression, hence having provided
extra help to the resistence against the column deformation
regarding the balance of two directional forces, and overpassed
the restriction of Euler critical force to form heavy-duty ultra-
pressure fine columns of tiny section sizes. The supportive
structure of an ideal conference center should have verdant
fine, dense and upright bamboo groves around the base.
Supported by pre-fabricated fine-column technology, a fine
column with a section side-length of 14 centimeters, a height
of 10.45 meters and a slenderness ratio of 1:75 has come into
being. Desirable construction quality has been simultaneously
achieved through quick construction of 45 days, based on an
industrialized construction system and corresponding design
and methods of design management. 
“The Internet conference center”is a new functional type in the
countryside. The composition of its elements is undoubtedly the
requirement of progress in our times.The way of thinking
regarding “types” and the essence of  “transformation” and
“evolution” are never marked by refusal, but urgent needs for
active merger of new technological strategies to promote the
integration between technology and local rural areas to prolong
innate order of the spatial environment.