Construction is underway on the MVRDV-designed Bihailou Art Village, a mixed-use cultural and commercial center that forms an eye-catching focal point for the community in Shatoujiao, just a stone’s throw from the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border. With its multicolored stack of irregular shapes, the design is based on the concept of the Vertical Village. Underpinned by this concept, the project gains much more than just a spectacular appearance: with each element of the program contained in its own “house”, complete with an individual shape, color, and material, different functions can operate at different hours. Meanwhile, the circulation spaces and terraces can be freely accessible – redefining the traditional commercial complex as a three-dimensional cultural landscape that is active at all hours of the day.
The Vertical Village concept was first developed by the think tank The Why Factory and MVRDV in 2011 and published as a book in 2012. In response to the rapid densification – and increasing homogeneity – of Asian cities, it proposed a development model that would combine all the individuality and community of village life with the density of the city: each resident would be able to design their own house, and they would be stacked in a manner that everybody has their own front door and access to views and natural light.
The Shenzhen Bihailou Art Village adopts this concept to serve the function of a retail and cultural center in a number of ways. Instead of a single large volume, the fragmented elements of the art village match the human scale and visual diversity of the other buildings in Shatoujiao.
Instead of residents who would design their own individual house, the Art Village has many different functions that are each given a sense of identity by their color, shape, and material – all features inspired by the colors, shapes, and materials of both the surrounding buildings and the Bihailou building, a well-known restaurant that once occupied the site. Each “house” is designed to fit the function that occupies it: for example, the multifunctional performance theatre gets a large, double-height space, with retractable chairs that allow it to transform into a spacious exhibition hall, and a floor-to-ceiling window facing the neighboring plaza that allows unexpected interactions between inside and out. Meanwhile, shops and restaurants can find a home in the design’s smaller blocks.
Crucially, just as residents of the Vertical Village would have their own front door, each “house” in the Art Village has its own entrance, meaning that the building’s circulation is part of the public space. This allows all the building’s functions – the shops, restaurants, theatre, and the Fish Lantern Museum that celebrates the unique cultural heritage of Shatoujiao – to operate independently, choosing their own opening hours. It also means the stairs, escalators, ramps, and gangways at the heart of the stack are permanently accessible; as visitors traverse this network, they will be able to glimpse the surroundings through the many gaps between the boxes, until they reach one of the project’s many roof terraces for views of the mountains, the cityscape, and the bay at any time of the day.
“The joy of this design lies in its contradictions”, says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. “It looks spectacular from afar, and up close, there is an intimacy to each space. It looks complex, but the idea of one space for every function is really quite simple. And though it may look like something that has never been done before, it is in fact a remix of the surrounding village: combining the colors, materials, and shapes of both its neighbors and the restaurant that once stood on this site. Fifteen years after the book, it manifests the call to humanize the city, in contrast to the scale of the monolithic tower developments all over the world, especially in Shenzhen. It combines density with humanity – what if we could make all our cities like this?”
The Shenzhen Bihailou Art Village sits as the centerpiece of a plaza that itself is at the heart of its neighborhood. As such, the design is imbued with a kind of civic generosity, not only in the form of its permanent accessibility and public roof terraces, but also on the ground level, where the stacked shape creates overhangs where people can shelter from sun and rain. The landscaping surrounding the building is designed to blend seamlessly with the existing plaza – cementing the building as an integral piece of the village of Shatoujiao.
MVRDV Bihailou Art Village Project Details:
Project Name: Bihailou Art Village
Location: Shenzhen, China
Year: 2023–
Client: Shenzhen Shatoujiao Commercial Foreign Trade Co., Ltd.
Size and Programme: 6500 m2 – Mixed use Theatre, Museum, Retail, Food & Beverage
Credits
Architect: MVRDV
Founding Partner in charge: Winy Maas
Partner: Wenchian Shi
Design Team: Kyo Suk Lee, Geert Folmer, Samuel Tam, Seunghan Yeum, Yifei Zhang, Manuel Villalain Gonzales, Xinyuan Zhang, Peter Chang, Yihong Chen, Luca Xu, Marcella Tamez Cabella, Kevin Zhao, Runjie Liu, Martin Chen Visualisations: Antonio Luca Coco, Lorenzo D’Alessandro, Angelo La Delfa, Stefano Fiaschi Copyright: MVRDV Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries
