Straw Stack Space in Houhu Art Park | WCY Regional Studio

Straw Stack Space in Houhu Art Park in Changsha, Hunan Province, which is a special ‘village in the middle of the city’ in Changsha that grew up spontaneously, located at the foot of Yuelu Mountain, and in the centre of the university town. Since the 1950s, the Houhu Art Park has become a unique cultural landmark in Changsha through its history of fisheries, art training and art exhibitions. And, Straw Stack Space is a small community cultural complex in Houhu Lake, integrates exhibitions, art salons, music performances and cultural and creative exchanges.

Using pure ‘Euclidean Geometry’ —square and circle as the basic graphic language, Straw Stack Space tries to revive the poetic atmosphere of Houhu’s past as a field and countryside through the abstraction and metaphor of ‘wheat (rice) haystacks’, round barns, sunbathing yards and other memorable scenes in the rural landscape.

The building occupies two residential sites, and we combined one house with six ‘cylinders’ in juxtaposition, while the other house has one ‘cylinder’ implanted in a pure ‘square’. The cylinder array and the standard square form an isomorphic and inverted base relationship.

The public cultural and artistic activities that take place in the Straw Stack Space with a sense of ‘autonomy’ or ‘accident’, such as contemporary art exhibitions, university graduation design exhibitions, small-scale music parties, modern dances, lawn music festivals, etc.

At this point, the ‘space’ has the ability of ‘functional transformation’,and it has already departed from the original design preconception, and has generated other interpretations, but it is also an unexpected praise to us.

The windows of the Straw Stack Space are mainly orientated to spatial experience, especially strengthening the use of natural top light: when the light is thrown down from the upper part of the building’s cylindrical space, through the vertical directivity of the cylinders, it draws one’s visual focus to the sky, establishing a relationship between the space, the body and the sky and the earth. Together with the geometrical order of the arrayed cylinders, it tries to let the body deeply perceive a certain ritual, quiet and poetic spatial atmosphere.

After the completion of the project, whether it is the indigenous villagers, neighbouring citizens, teachers and students of the university, or foreign tourists, when they are relaxing in the Straw Stack Space, they will feel a special kind of ‘spatial’ information, which tries to evoke the memory of a familiar place or unfamiliar reverie, which belongs to the unique ‘sense of place’ of the Houhu Art Park or the Straw Stack Space, and it is also the power of the Archetype that we are looking for.

Project Info
Architects: WCY Regional Studio
Country: China, Changsha
Area: 748 m²
Year: 2023
Photographs: Jinquan Kong, Haohao Xu
Design Team: Chengsi Liao, Guang Zhang, Yutao Chen, Minghao Guan, Cong Gao, Xiaozhe Zhou, Qian Yu, Yi Zhang, Xin Wang
Structural Engineering: Jianhua Zhu
Interior Design: Jingbo Li
Curtain Wall: Ming Zhong, Yong Zhang
Electrical Engineering: Jian Liu, Chaoyu Tan, Zhentao Su, Weilin Wang
Plumbing: Cheng Li
HVAC: Yilun Luo
Clients: Changsha Houhu Industrial Investment Development Co.Ldt