Shajing Village Hall wins intl. award

Shajing Village Hall in Bao’an District. Shenzhen Evening News

Shajing Village Hall, designed by Zhang Yuxing and Han Jing from ARCity Office, was announced as the Jury Winner for the government and civic buildings category in the 10th Annual A+ Awards on Tuesday, Shenzhen Evening News reported.

This year, over 8,000 entries from 80-plus countries and regions were submitted to the competition, one of the world’s largest awards programs focusing on promoting and celebrating the year’s best architecture and spaces. The Jury Winners were selected by over 200 highly esteemed juries across the world.

Shajing Village Hall in Bao’an District was completed in 2020. It was built in the ruins of Gangtou Diesel Power Plant and has become a new symbolic and spiritual space.

The project is based on the concept and methodology of sustainable design, absorbing the local space’s cultural characteristics and transforming the old plant into a new ancestral hall, according to the project profile.

The renovated building acts as a spatial medium to attract young people to gather there and focuses on the old village, which has been almost neglected, and where traditional cultures such as lion dancing, mantis boxing and Cantonese Opera can be gradually revived.

Its designers said that Shajing Village Hall has rebuilt the spiritual world of individuals and communities on top of all the ruins of the modern city, thus transforming the “material factory” into a “spiritual factory.”