The Yangjiang Cultural Center, completed in 2023, represents a groundbreaking approach to cultural architecture in China's medium-sized cities. Designed by the Architectural Design & Research Institute of SCUT in collaboration with Yifang Design Group, this 35,634-square-meter complex has transformed the cultural landscape of Yangjiang City by integrating seven distinct institutions under one innovative roof.
Located on the northern shore of Moyang Lake Park, the comprehensive cultural center enjoys a prime position with stunning views and a beautiful natural environment. The facility houses the Archives Center, Party History Museum, Local Records Museum, Hall of Fame, museum, planning hall, and Workers' Cultural Palace, creating what architects call a "seven halls in one" configuration. This ambitious project has successfully injected new vitality into surrounding communities while establishing itself as a prominent cultural landmark in Yangjiang's expanding urban area.
The center's revolutionary design strategy focuses on functional integration and shared intensification, representing a new model for cultural building construction in China's medium-sized cities. By concentrating seven independent operating institutions around a shared central atrium, the complex creates rich spatial experiences for visitors while optimizing operational efficiency. This centralized approach significantly shortens circulation paths, conserves land usage, reduces surface area requirements, and minimizes air conditioning energy consumption, effectively eliminating waste of public supporting resources.
Architects envisioned the cultural center as more than just a landmark building – they designed it as a vibrant community space that seamlessly integrates with the adjacent park. The podium extends directly into Moyang Lake Park, featuring a gentle grassy slope that incorporates cafes, book bars, and recreational facilities. Citizens can freely enter and use these spaces for relaxation and social activities. The platform includes ornamental plants and stone steps that provide panoramic views of Moyang Lake and the river, allowing various social activities to occur without interference.
The building's sustainable design responds directly to the challenges of the subtropical coastal climate, characterized by high solar radiation and hot, humid conditions. The architects implemented numerous passive building design measures to reduce operational energy consumption. The most significant and technically challenging aspect is the vertical sunshade pottery rod system for the facade. The design team developed a large composite pottery rod sunshade system with an original patent, using parametric positioning control combined with simulation calculations of sunlight exposure angles and radiation intensity.
This sophisticated parametric design creates pottery rods at different angles and heights across all facade orientations, achieving optimal sunshade, heat insulation, and lighting effects. The building's passive layout facilitates natural ventilation and cooling, taking advantage of summer sea breezes that cool the lake surface and bring refreshing air to reduce ambient temperatures. The design incorporates ventilated atriums, wind openings, and strategically placed facade windows to enable natural ventilation during spring and autumn transitions, significantly reducing operational energy consumption.
The architectural form draws deep inspiration from Yangjiang City's most distinctive geographical feature: the integration of mountains and sea. The design arranges a white building volume symbolizing the sea as the upper structure, while the lower volume features a green platform representing abstract mountain and river elements. Together with flowing curved forms that symbolize nature, these elements create the unique mountain-and-sea regional characteristics that define the cultural center's identity.
The building's sophisticated facade design offers visitors different visual experiences from various vantage points around the structure. The subtle planar shapes and carefully controlled contours create undulating profiles that change as people move around the building. The parameterized facade pottery rod texture generates rich and dynamic light and shadow patterns under sunlight, resembling sails and waves moving in ocean breezes when viewed from a distance, effectively demonstrating Yangjiang's coastal city identity and cultural confidence.
Environmental sustainability extends beyond the facade system to include comprehensive ecological features. The roof garden, created by covering the base with soil and vegetation, functions as a biological retention area while rainwater collection devices irrigate landscape plants, achieving the ecological sustainability goals of a sponge city design. This integrated approach to water management and urban ecology demonstrates how cultural buildings can contribute to broader environmental objectives.
The project represents a significant advancement in cultural architecture for medium-sized Chinese cities, proving that innovative design strategies can successfully balance functional requirements, environmental sustainability, and regional identity. The Yangjiang Cultural Center stands as a testament to how thoughtful architectural integration can create spaces that serve multiple community needs while establishing new standards for cultural building design in subtropical coastal regions.
