Mafuyuan Tourist Center is located at the entrance of Mafuyuan Village which is a typical small village in the suburbs of Nanjing City in China. It is renovated from two existing vacant two-story brick-concrete structures normal rural houses, and aims to provide more public space with new functions for the local people.
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4.Mafuyuan Tourist Center
Public Building (Built)
Firm
SEU-ARCH & Zhengzhong International
Architect/Designer
ZHU Yuan
Design Team
ZHU Yuan, SUN Yuan, LIU Yan, FAN Cheng , LIU Wenjun, FAN Tianlei, JI Wenjuan、ZHOU Shunyun, ZHANG Huaping
Location
Mafuyuan Village, Jiangning District, Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, China
Country
China
Photographer/Copyright
©HOU Bowen
Website
N/A
Instagram
N/A
Mafuyuan Village has good natural resources and a rich historical rural culture. In the beginning, we paid more attention to the decline of surrounding villages caused by the rapid urbanization process of metropolises and took the Mafuyuan Tourist Center as an opportunity to optimize the situation of population loss, cultural decline, vacant houses, lack of infrastructure and so on. The project aims to promote rural revitalization and improve villagers’ lives and revive the rural culture. In the view of spatial structure and typology, we think about how to represent local rural objects in the village to keep the cultural memory with controllable cost and the combination of local technology.
Concerning the approach of these two rural buildings’ renovation. Firstly, connecting in the air. Two buildings are connected through a corridor on the second floor to create an indoor platform for connecting functional spaces and viewing. Secondly, courtyard in between. We reorganize the public spaces between the buildings to provide a shared courtyard for the villagers. Thirdly, seeds for the memory, the building takes seeds as the main theme into the spatial organization with a seed window, and the landscape settings around the building are combined with seed-related objects to remind the rural daily life with normal agricultural production in modern way.
Mafuyuan Tourist Center can be seen as an attempt to renovate ordinary Chinese villages with suburban and agricultural elements to keep the memory and life in the village and reproduce the spirit of the rural place.