Location: Shaoxing, China.

Architect: The Architectural Design and Research Institute of Zhejiang University Co., Ltd.

The Shaoxing Hotel, which originated from the Lingxiao Pavilion, is a traditional architectural complex with white walls, black tiles, winding corridors, bridges over flowing water, and well-spaced flowers and trees. Over the past 60 years, it has undergone many reconstructions and upgrades, resulting in a trend of diversification. The Reconstruction and Upgrading Project includes a new lobby and a multi-purpose hall. The new lobby covers an area of 2,600 m2 and is one-story and 14 m tall. The lobby has a four-slope metal roof on a modern square box, which forms the intersection point between the new north-south axis and the east-west axis. The multi-purpose hall has a gross floor area of 7978.34 m2 and is 16.595 m tall with one-story main part and three-story local part. The hall design is inspired by daily city life and developed from the sentiments to landscape. The new lobby and multi-purpose hall are designed to work in concert with the east-west axis of landscape. The lobby’s roof covering design expresses the roof covering into an architectural form that is more in line with modern functional needs and spirit expression by using modern languages: steel structure, glass, lattice, and canopy. The overall conception comes from the “landscape idea” in the field of design. The multi-purpose hall is designed to avoid drastic rebuilding and seek an artful fusion of landscape to build an appropriate urban forest looking on the complex city life. The differences in architectural from treatment between before and after and the staggered linear roof coverings hide the big meeting space from views and soften the building volume. The design of the Shaoxing Hotel is inspired by the natural and cultural properties of the base, the centennial buildings of Shaoxing Hotel, Fushan combining the Wu and Yue cultures, and profound cultural deposits of Shaoxing from a broader perspective. The traditional big roofs sketch the contours of mountains in a range, and well-arranged side walls form vivid elevations of the building. Carved hollow windows and modular columns switched life between city and forest. The design emphasizes the fusion with daily urban life and creates modern experience in the urban forest by means of design.