A small practice founded by staff and students from London’s Bartlett School of Architecture, including built environment dean Christine Hawley, has won an invited competition to design a cultural park on the site of a former mine in Heyuan City, China.
The Hakka Cultural Park project, by Metamode Architects, includes a 6,000sq m museum of traditional Chinese Hakka culture, a 20,000sq m city library and a 3,200sq m planning exhibition hall as well as a 1.3km-long strip of park land and a viewing platform.
The Hakka people are a subgroup of the Han Chinese and the design includes a series of circular dials, echoing the design of traditional Hakka buildings and pointing to the regions around the world to which the Hakka have migrated.
“The Hakka buildings that are retained in China are like the Chinese equivalent of Stonehenge — they’re very important,” said Andrew Porter, director at Metamode. “That was the primary form that has informed the design.”
Each of the built structures on the site symbolises a key moment in the migratory history of the Hakka, with square shapes created by the building forms used to frame vistas across the park.