Peach Hut Community Centre in China by ATELIER XI.

ATELIER XI’s Peach Hut Community Centre is the first in a series of miniature pavilions that will bring cultural and art education to the Xiuwu Henan county in northeast China. Instead of designing one 300-square-metre public building as originally commissioned, ATELIER XI proposed a series of smaller facilities spread across multiple locations. Considering the vast 630-square-kilometre country area and the difficultly of travelling between the scattered villages, their proposal addresses the need to better serve the local community.

Peach Hut aims to inspire the local residents, alleviating feelings of isolation and poverty. These remote rural areas lack sufficient educational resources and have limited access to information and imaginative architectural solutions. “Community leaders and architects seek an aesthetic approach toward rejuvenating these communities”, explain the architects. With minimal architectural interventions, they seek to improve a populations’ quality of life and offer a fresh new outlook.

Related: TEA Community Centre in Xiamen, China by Waterfrom Design.

“These cast-in-place concrete miniatures are interpreted into a series of tree-shaped spaces with tentacles reading out for the sky, bathing in light and shadow,” says ATELIER XI. “Their locations vary from fields and woods to mountaintops. Their forms differ as well: while one grows out from the ruined walls in an abandoned village, another embodies a floating theatre on the water.”

Peach Hut is the first completed pavilion that sits surrounded by a field of blossoming peach trees. The building’s arresting curving form is largely inspired by the twisting shapes of the local trees that all lean to one side. The architect envisions that “the building is cut from a series of invisible arcs derived from the earth and the cloud, forming a unique shape that rises to the sky.”

The construction of the pavilions is divided into two phases with the first one consisting of a periscope (a vernacular theatre), observatory (a beverage bear in a peach tree farmland), and Bent House (a communal library).

The exterior of Peach Hut’s sculptural form features a peachy hue that looks almost as delicious as the fruit on the trees that surround it. As the day progresses and turns into night, the pink hue reveals and conceals various colours and textures – the changing light conditions bring with them a new lease on life.

Related: Aires Mateus’ Community Centre in Grândola, Portugal.

[Photography by Zhang Chao.]