Postindustrielles Leuchtzeichen: Baoshan Exhibition Center von Kokaistudios

The Luojing harbour area in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, some 50 km northwest of downtown Shanghai, is characterised by industrial facilities, wharves and waste tips, as well as the occasional landscape park at an old brownfield site, where the heavy industries of earlier times are also in retreat here and there. The state-owned Baowu Steel Group thus intends to erect a waste incineration plant accompanied by a park, office buildings and a museum at the grounds of its former steelworks. To attract investors and prospective tenants to the area, the Group commissioned the Shanghai architectural office Kokaistudios to design an exhibition pavilion where models and drawings are to visualize what is envisaged for the site in future, and where the public can learn about waste incineration technology.
Instead of setting the 725-square-metre new-build out on the plot, the client decided to have it integrated into the steel skeleton structure of one of the site’s few remaining industrial plants. This is to be left in place as an industrial monument over the long term; whether this also applies to the exhibition pavilion remains to be seen. Heavy steel beams, silos and long conveyor belts now form a framework for a delicate-looking structure of polycarbonate panels 40 mm thick and steel profiles in white paint, but beyond that play no further role, the pavilion being independent of the old steel skeleton thanks to a supporting structure of its own. Old and new intermingle in intricate and sometimes bewildering fashion, making the industrial legacy tangible in the otherwise uncluttered and adaptable interior of the pavilion, built in materials that create an ethereal and cool aesthetic broken solely by the wooden surfaces of the furnishings. The architects focused not only on low-weight choices concerning the materials but also on ease of dismantling or removal, as shown by the flooring, which consists of large concrete blocks on raised floor supports the same height as the reinforced concrete foundations of the encompassing steel plant.  Sanitary areas are not tiled, but lined in sheet stainless steel. In their design for the outdoor spaces, Kokaistudios mainly made use of what the site had to offer. Most of the surrounding trees could thus be kept, and strips of brownish blast furnace slag alternate with concrete paving slabs on the pathways.