HeyTown Art Center

The project is located right in the center of an urban enclave of declining industrial plants, which has remained forgotten and uncultivated for the past 3 decades. The client aims to regenerate this area though bringing in creative industries and gradually building up a mixed-use community.
 
At the heart of this creative zone, we proposed to transform one of the industrial spaces to an art center, following a strategy of "spatial prototype shift": which appropriates the prototype of the saw-tooth shaped plant building and adapts it to suit for multiple programs. The characteristic volume grows out of the shape of a plant building, and gradually extends forward, twisting at the end as it almost touches the elevated railway, forming a sense of ephemeral levitation while sitting on a mass of red bricks.
 
The project features an aluminum façade, which was taken as an experiment on potential "natures" of the material: minimum angle of folding, jumping rhythm of corrugations, changing ratio of perforation…all together to achieve a tangible experience of the architecture that is in constant "dialogue" with the surroundings.
  
The building consists in three basic segments - entrance hall with HeyGallery on the second floor, connected through a large spiral stair; central space that switches between a theater with 500 seats or open up as exhibition space with direct skylight; back of house zone with function rooms.
 
Through the density of the events it generates, the art center weaves together surrounding public amenities for people with different needs, as a "social condenser”. The project is an effective response to the multiplicity of its context, which not only brings up an answer for how to make a cultural landmark, at where the collision of old and new happens, but also becomes an anchor point of the urban renewal in Beijing.