New Youth Commune, a mixed youth community, located on the edge of Songhua Lake Resort and bordering natural villages, houses 800 people with the upper floors for resort staff, the middle rented to the commercial tenants in the resort town, the ground floor engaged for camping students/kids and further open to surrounding villagers.
 
META-Project has been focusing on what Chinese media called the “ant-tribe” problem - many young people live as packed in clusters of poorly remoulded buildings. Based on substantial investigation on such hybrid dwelling phenomena peculiar to China, from Village-In-the-City to the “Stuffed-Tube” housing blocks, we attempted to grasp the dynamics of such settlements and come up with a nuanced spatial grading logic according to the flow of everyday life and neighbourhood interactions, eventually arrived at a new operative framework of public spaces, that rethink the idea of “social housing” in a flexible, pluralistic and socio-ecological way.
 
The design set out from the “Stuffed-Tube” collective housing stereotype, and mutated it into an externally undulating and internally interlocked volumetric quartet. Bridges, stairs and stepped seatings embedded into the atrium, composes an open-street-like public route connecting all grades of communal spaces for varied activities. The simple and flexible framework blends innovative spatial mode with everyday life.
 
The interior has a valley-like atrium with slanted ceiling for each section, allowing natural light and ventilation to form a sustainable micro-climate. A continuous multi-level public route encouraging cross-layer encounters through the semi-private, shared and collective zones, and to foster the self-growth of community.   
 
The project responds to the hybridity of contemporary Chinese reality and proposes a new paradigm of social housing based on share-living. It enables positive interpersonal interaction and mutual collaboration, through the flexible and multiplex spatial operation, and further develop into a prototype community for contemporary “new youth”.