China

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schmidt hammer lassen architects has won an international competition to design a new home for the West Shanghai Workers’ Cultural Palace. This project has been a widely popular destination for Shanghai’s Labor Union workers and local community since it opened in 1959. The new proposal will include a theater, cinema, art and exhibition spaces, as well as office, sports facilities, commercial spaces, and a transportation hub -- all settled within the eight hectare site.

Modernism was a stylistic evolution meant to jettison the baggage that had moored culture to habits and historicism. But it was more than an architectural style: it was a new and universal way of life meant to eradicate variability, to relish in the ease of sameness and reproducibility. It’s easy to be seduced by Modernism when you’re talking about motel rooms, or Starbucks, or your shirt size at a favorite store, all instances where replication is reassuring. But the movement’s biggest advocates, governments and developers, pushed the style to its extreme in large housing blocks - a typology long out of fashion in the United States, but which continues to be de rigueur in countries intent on achieving rapid economic expansion and concentrating its populations in urban regions.

Look at an aerial photograph of the periphery of any Chinese city and you will see the monotony of towers that rise out of the ground like modules on a silicon circuit board. Viewing drabness with cautionary eyes, designer Feifei Feng’s project "Urban Playhouse: A Communal Drama in Seven Acts," proposes a series of interventions, or "acts," on a field of four and six-story slab housing buildings in Jinan, China, adding social spaces ("follies") that are intended to regenerate the spontaneity and theatricality of living in close quarters.

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HENN has won first place in the competition to design Kingdee Tower, the headquarters for software company Kingdee in Shenzhen, China. The 44-story glazed tower will be the central building for the new headquarters, rising from an irregular pentagon plan situated between two existing nine-story blocks.

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Videos

In May 2015, Shenzhen Art Museum and Shenzhen Library organized an international design competition for their new homes in Longhua District. 134 firms submitted concept proposals for the first stage, eight firms were selected to enter the second phase competition in July, among them OMA, Steven Holl, Mecanoo, OPEN, KSP, and others. Below is OPEN’s competition entry for the second phase.

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