Stellar Isle | SpActrum

Stellar Isle (Xing Yu) is the largest and most remarkable cultural leisure building in the Chaichanglong (Fairy Li) urban regeneration and reconstruction region in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, China. Chaichanglong is the first organic urban regeneration area in Shaoxing’s old town, located directly across from the historic home of revolutionary legend Qiu Jin, with Xianheng Hotel to the east and Pagoda Hill to the north. It has become a full cultural, commercial, and residential complex after five years of rehabilitation and renewal.

© Shengliang Su

During the first visit to the site, the SpActrum team noticed that Chaichanglong was a complex where residential and production buildings from various eras coexisted in an unorganized yet authentic manner. SpActrum thinks that history is a continuous process, not just in time but also in space. As a result, they did not rely simply on heritage markers to choose whether to preserve or demolish. Instead, they saw both conventional and “heritage buildings” as essential components of the site. The only trustworthy text was the site’s material existence, allowing the site’s sense of time to emerge as a continuous and ongoing geological environment, similar to sedimentation in geological layers.

© Shengliang Su

Stellar Isle’s Design Concept

Stellar Isle is located on the southern axis of Chaichanglong, where a four-story brick-and-concrete structure once dominated the whole site. However, structural evaluations found that this building could not be saved and posed serious safety hazards. As a result, the design team opted to demolish it and replace it with a new building of comparable height. Instead of constructing a conventional structure, they sought to establish a three-dimensional site capable of altering the spatial structure of the overall regeneration project. The goal is to build an aerial environment that connects many eras of the site and city, achieving synchrony between the past and the present.

© Shengliang Su

Stellar Isle is intended to be an accessible and interconnected space with strong multi-path components that allow each space to be connected via numerous pathways. Stellar Isle is transformed into a true aerial garden with this design. Stellar Isle’s most famous design concept is “Layered Grounds,” in which multiple levels overlap and form a dynamic interplay of walking and viewing locations. This is a site-specific design in which the notions of building and location penetrate rather than contradict each other. The structure does not exist for its own sake; it becomes a distinct spot, a place of activity fraught with ambiguity. The building disintegrates here, and the site rises.

© Shengliang Su

Stellar Isle, once built, will serve as an important local landmark on the site’s southern axis. The northern side of the building is a simple rectangular block with large foldable sliding doors on each floor that open to create a continuous open space. The southern side is made up of walkable terraced surfaces that stack around a central empty space, while the eastern side is made up of layered, sloping walkways that are structured as gentle stairs. These steps fold up to offer multiple viewing platforms at 6 and 9.5 meters in height. While Stellar Isle has only around 1,000 square meters of interior area, the terraces, pathways, and other outward-looking areas give it the ideal vantage point for taking in the entire site and city. The neighboring Ming and Qing dynasties’ courtyards, Republican-era houses, 1970s-1980s apartments, and ancient factory buildings unfold like a horizontal scroll, linked by these stepping walkways and producing a multi-layered, multi-dimensional panorama of the location.

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