Shanghai Qingpu Pinghe Sports Center

The Qingping (Pinghe) Sports Center in Shanghai's Qingpu District is an OPEN Architecture project led by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, for Shanghai Tixue Education Technology, with structural engineering by Jianyan Technology. Within the OPEN-designed Qingping Pinghe Bilingual School campus, the building appears almost weightless: two warm-white air-bags floating above a transparent glass box at ground level. The larger east air-bag houses a covered gymnasium for basketball, volleyball, badminton, taekwondo and fencing, plus small fitness rooms; the smaller west air-bag is a swimming pool with five 25-metre lanes; the ground-floor glass box is the school canteen. Positioned near the north city road, the building is designed to open to the surrounding community during holidays, sharing sports facilities with a fast-growing new town. To prevent three of the campus's largest volumes from overwhelming the site, the architects lift them as if weightless: soft air-bag colours and shapes, a transparent ground floor and atrium, irregular perforated aluminium cladding, and a double-layer wall of tensile membrane and polycarbonate sheets together dissolve heavy mass. The gym's column-free span is lined with warm bamboo panels, deep-grey crash walls and retractable tiered seating on both sides, lit by long skylights so no artificial light is needed by day. The pool's double-skin membrane and polycarbonate facades flood the interior with comfortable daylight, and openings at both ends frame campus and city views. A vertical glass atrium between the two air-bags brings skylight into a 12-metre stair hall overlooking gym activity, while the transparent canteen allows diners to watch campus life, especially the outdoor basketball court. The double-skin facade is the building's core: a large-span space frame between outer and inner skins cantilevers to keep interiors clean and the exterior floating, hides M&E services for maintenance, and breathes to reduce air-conditioning loads. At night, the swimming-pool membrane glows and the canteen's evening-study light shines out like a warm lantern, while perforated patterns reveal the structure and equipment behind, as if the building can breathe.