Wufu Longjing Agricultural Products Exhibition Center / Describing Architecture Studio
Text description provided by the architects. The Wufu Longjing Agricultural Products Exhibition Center is located in the Wufu Longjing Smart Agricultural Creation Park, Baofeng Town, Zhushan County. This project is one of the key projects for Zhushan County to build a “billion-yuan agricultural processing industry.” It relies on 1,200 acres of land connected to Longjing Village and Hanxihe Village in Baofeng Town to build the Agricultural Smart Park, Agricultural Cultivation Park, and Agricultural Research Park. It aims to create an ecological demonstration base for agricultural tourism integration that integrates “smart agriculture, agricultural experience, education and research, leisure tourism, and catering and entertainment”. The goal is to effectively promote rural revitalization, stimulate regional economic development, and drive more than 1,000 households of villagers in the surrounding areas to achieve stable income growth. The Agricultural Products Exhibition Center is located at the entrance of the park, which is the starting point of the entire park. It needs to accommodate the gathering of visitors, tourists, and researchers. At the same time, it also serves as a window for displaying and selling agricultural products.
Open Space – A closed place that relies on air conditioning facilities can effectively improve the comfort of the staying space. However, as a rural tourism project in a fragmented rural environment, the building cannot guarantee continuous comfort requirements. Providing an open space that can connect indoor and outdoor areas and make it relatively flexible can effectively reduce energy consumption and management costs of the building while forming a good transition between indoor and outdoor spaces.
The Wufu Longjing Smart Agriculture Creation Park is nearly 2 kilometers long. The exhibition center is located at its starting point not the center, which also determines that it provides people with a stay is the beginning and the end, while other rest areas still need to be set up along the way during the visit. The exhibition center is surrounded by several modern agricultural greenhouses. These large volumes, precise temperature control of light steel structure greenhouses, in a rigorous and closed greenhouse image. On the contrary, we hope that in this rural area, people’s activities are relatively free and open.
Under the shed – The building takes the form of a “shed”, under which there are scattered closed rooms such as toilets, offices, agricultural products stores, video exhibitions, and business negotiation rooms. The strip metal roof matches the strip mechanism of the surrounding vegetable greenhouses, and forms an approximately circular boundary by advancing and retreating, making it stand out softly from the square and regular pattern of the greenhouse. There are paths leading to the exhibition center from all around, and the circular shape also provides a relatively equal status without a dominant surface.
The entrance of the building adopts a welcoming posture, with a relatively high open surface. After entering, with the increase in terrain, the height of the “shed” gradually decreases. The change in spatial height along the walking route also affects the perception of space, Until finally leaving here and entering the spatial level of the park tour, the “shed” lowers to a height with a sense of intimacy, creating a courtyard-style resting space. Lowering the roof level by level simultaneously dissolves the overall scale of the large space, allowing light to penetrate. Compared with precise and organized drainage, the reasonably scattered drainage method conforms to the drainage practices of rural architecture. Rainwater flows naturally from high to low, and channel steel is added at the exit to stop and disperse to both sides, and the others are scattered into the courtyard. On a rainy day, under the building, through the Translucent slits, you can see the water falling like a waterfall.
Easy to build – The steel structure was chosen for ease of procurement and construction. The entrance of the building is relatively high, and in order to improve the bearing capacity, the columns are broken into lattice columns, and the main beams are sandwiched between them. The central lattice column to undertake two different heights of the main beam, with a 5% drainage slope to the low tilt, layer by layer, and arranging strip lights along the main beams for the main lighting, the lamp wires passing through the main beam cavity, and exactly passing through the middle of the last column, one set per row. In order to prevent rainwater from flowing back into the room during heavy rains, a 1.2m-long overlapping surface is set between each layer. The secondary beams and purlins are oriented in the same direction, so they are combined into one body and connected by tie rods.
The roof is corrugated tile with thermal insulation coating on the underside, the floor is hardener floor, and the enclosed space is divided by glass, wood, or solid wall according to its usage requirements. The light steel is made into a triangular truss, with steel plates installed on the front and back, one side serving as the background of the logo, and the other side serving as the display wall. The leftover steel plate is processed into service tables, display tables, seats, and flower boxes. The courtyard is paved with crushed stones mixed with concrete, hiding the drainage ditch around the fence. The fence was constructed using rock fragments left over from the nearby hills. Water is brought in from a canal across the road to form a water feature around the building, which will be used as a fish pond in the future.”