Silver A' Design Award Winner 2022
The white luminous facade of gad's Haimen Agricultural Exhibition Hall operates within a rich symbolic vocabulary connecting agricultural traditions, craft heritage, and aspirational modernity through carefully orchestrated architectural language. The perforated surface pattern evokes traditional paper-cutting arts practiced throughout agrarian communities, where intricate decorative works celebrate harvests, seasons, and cultural ceremonies, translating ephemeral craft into permanent architectural expression that honors makers and making. The sawtooth roofline carries archetypal resonance with agricultural and industrial buildings designed to capture consistent northern light, connecting exhibition spaces with manufacturing traditions while creating ascending triangular forms suggesting growth, aspiration, and the upward thrust of cultivated plants reaching toward sunlight. The chromatic dominance of white establishes multiple symbolic registers simultaneously, connoting purity and freshness associated with agricultural products, the blank canvas upon which cultural narratives might be inscribed, and the luminous quality of structures designed to transmit rather than absorb light. The building's reflection in still water activates ancient symbolic associations between reflection and contemplation, doubling and completeness, while specifically connecting architectural intervention with the water resources essential to agricultural cultivation. The stepped massing creates a processional narrative of ascent, suggesting progressive revelation and the cumulative building of knowledge appropriate to educational exhibition programs. The juxtaposition with traditional vernacular structures establishes a visual dialogue between heritage and innovation, suggesting cultural continuity rather than rupture, with the exhibition hall positioned as custodian and interpreter rather than replacement of accumulated agricultural wisdom. The twilight atmospheric conditions capture liminal temporality associated with threshold experiences, moments of transition between day and night that traditionally carry ceremonial significance in agrarian calendars attuned to celestial rhythms and seasonal cycles.
Haimen Agricultural Exhibition Hall is located in China's first ecological farm. The architectural motif is derived from the image of barn in agricultural civilization. The appearance of field barn is rooted in the prototype of square barn and round granary. It not only integrated the legalist thought of up her barns solid and know etiquette, and clothing foot but wed bred, but also coincided with the current goal of building a well-off society in China.