International Architecture Awards Tell a friend
ARCHIVE 2025
International Architecture Awards
Architects: Atelier Global Limited
Lead Architect: Frankie Lui
Design Team: Cai Chao
Client: Michael Zhang
Photographers: ZHIYI
Located in the Most Beautiful Village of Northern Fujian—Commune STORE is a revamped abandoned rural primary school, embraced by mountains, bamboo forests and terraced rice paddies. Designed with a focus on rejuvenating rice culture and revitalizing the village, it explores the realm of natural architecture that fosters a postmodern lifestyle for new farmers. The architecture endeavors to embody respect and responsiveness to nature, the site and daily life, transforming into a spiritual oasis that embodies authenticity and self-discovery.
This is a project that combines both design and operation, with minimal intervention to renovate and revitalize public spaces. The architect and the client actively participate in farming, promote organic rice cultivation for rural revitalization and development, drive local employment, and provide visitors with a cultural experience of year-round rice cultivation.
Traditional and Beautiful Village—Houyuan
Founded in Ming Dynasty, Houyuan Village lies at the base of a 600m mountain, with a pristine forest crown, bamboo-lined mid-slopes, and terraced rice paddies below. Traditional mud-walled, wooden houses dot the terraces, reflecting centuries of farming heritage and a deep agricultural culture from an architectural lens.
Construction Strategy—Restore & Revive
As the only public building in the village, the original primary school carries the education and emotions of several generations of people in the village. Therefore, while respecting and preserving the existing characteristics of the site, the basic layout of the overall building and all available walls are maximally maintained. Through a continuous roof, the three buildings are connected, and five 60-year-old well growing metasequoia trees are preserved. The newly renovated building becomes both a container for carrying memories and an anchor point between the past and the present, providing a permanent education memory for the villagers and a resting place away from the hustle and bustle and close to nature for visitors. It also becomes a new field for inheriting and revitalizing the original village culture.
Terrain-responsive Design—A Natural Embrace
Our design responds to the contours of the terrain and surrounding terraced fields.
Journey of Conceal and Reveal
The entrance is set on the hidden side of the STORE, guiding visitors along a peaceful path up to the hilltop and into a courtyard surrounded by preserved trees, then see terraced fields and bamboo forests in the distance, and finally focus on the building.
Roof as Promenade
The curved roof not only softens the rigid mass and weight of the original architecture, but also offers multi-dimensional opportunities for interaction with nature. This fluid design seamlessly blends into the continuous mountainscape, achieving a unity of form, function, and view from an architectural perspective.
The placement of steel structures preserves the industrialization sense, maintains a dialogue between the old and the new, and forms a n-shaped public living hall and corridor as a social place, providing new memory retention.
Scenery Is Everywhere
Create dynamic landscape paintings of the four seasons through frames of varying sizes.
Preserve and Repair
The stone walls and relatively intact brick walls in the original building were preserved and repaired, with only simple jointing treatment. Deliberately preserving the years of moss on brick walls and the traces of children painting and painting on brick walls, preserving the memories of the times.
Recycling Utilization
For the wooden beams and boards removed from the roof, they can be reprocessed and applied to ceilings, walls, door panels, cabinets, etc., effectively reducing costs and giving new vitality to waste wood. At the same time, construction waste such as cement blocks and broken stone slabs are also reused for paving and mountain road hardening, effectively reducing resource waste and improving the durability and aesthetics of roads.
Local Sourcing Materials
In the restoration of building retaining walls, locally produced bamboo templates were used to pour concrete, cleverly preserving the aesthetic charm of natural elements and making each wall a witness to the harmonious coexistence of nature and artificial elements.
