Youth Center in Qingpu

Qingpu, Shanghai, China

About

Qingpu Youth Center is located in new town of eastern Qingpu. Compared with the old town, the new town schemes with a large-scale structure of straight roads in high availability. Due to unified and overly rigid planning controls, the distance between buildings and roads shows monotony and alienation. Scale change derives from transformation in traffic patterns and population growth, while architectural style is affected by modern urban culture. In main roads of Qingpu new town, the humanizing small-scale spaces of traditional Jiangnan towns are basically disappeared. But once entering the secondary public space, you can still be connected with memories about Jiangnan, such as the space of Beijing Garden, the river near the south of administration collage, or along Huaqing Road, Xiayang village which has not been demolished yet and its ponds. etc, that prompts a possibilities for building humanizing small-scale public space under the large-scale city. Qingpu Youth Center decompose spaces with different functions according to their exact characteristics, turning them into relatively small-scale units and organizes them all together by outer spaces, such as courtyards, squares, streets, etc, finally making a aggregation of building units. Youth activities among spaces- the link between spaces with different functions, aimless wandering and random discovery - just as in a small city, which is a response for the increasingly larger-scale city in the process of urbanization in suburbs. We hope the humanizing small-scale space could still be created under the premise, and memories of traditional towns could be rebuilt. In the traditional living space in south Yangtze River, external space are equal treated with the internal space, or even more important. This project obeys the tradition, and the humanizing and interesting external space excellently corresponds to characteristics of teenagers’ personalities and activities. A building can also be a small city. collapse