Eco-Farm Series - Harvest Pavilion

Kunshan, China

Architects: Vector Architects

Location: Kunshan, China
Year: 2012

Sited in an Eco-farm alongside the Yang Cheng Lake, Kunshan，the project consists of 4 small scale public buildings: a club house, a harvest pavilion, a botanical showroom, and an information center. In the spring of 2012, the harvest pavilion became the first one being completed.

The farm is vast, flat, and wide open to sky. Different from the congested vertical massing image of urban life, such an empty flatness of the site is an essential nature that we believe the architecture should respond to. Our design task is to explore how architecture should be integrated into such a context, to create a new and unique place, however harmonize with nature.

The harvest pavilion appears a simple, light, and translucent cuboid, with a horizontal thin plane hovering at the top, flying parallel with the horizon in the distance. The plane, made of pre-fabricated aluminum rods, cantilevers out at 4 sides at various depths. The space below becomes a transition zone from the interior to exterior, and promotes the potential activities because of the pleasant shadow casted by the canopy. The building façade system consists of vertical laminated bamboo louvers, floor-to-ceiling frameless glass panels, and pivoting glass doors, The transparency and lightness of such a material combination visually fuse the building volume with its surrounding landscape, and make the architecture sensitive to light. Under the condition of nice weather, when the pivoting glass doors are all rotated to open, the indoor space is literally stretched out into the farmland.