Shanghai EXPO YuanGu Hotel

Designed by Beijing Wuzhi Design for the Yuangu Group, with construction by Huazhuang Brothers, the Yuangu Hotel in Shanghai's Expo area is positioned as an urban resort for a city where business logic and leisure demand increasingly overlap. Yuangu is a brand advocating a Chinese lifestyle, and the hotel is its spiritual carrier: lodging, dining, tea and the Yuangu shop together convey the brand. The brief placed 100 guest rooms in a five-storey main building and 20 in a three-storey annex, with reception, tea rooms, restaurant, kitchen and service spaces rebuilt from scratch. The designers admitted they underestimated the project's scope, which drew on small-scale planning, architecture, structural retrofit, interior and landscape design simultaneously. Work split into rational and emotional directions. Following Vitruvius, the existing building met none of utilitas, firmitas or venustas, so every door, window, structural reinforcement, roof waterproofing and service placement was addressed to make the hotel usable and solid. The harder task was giving the hotel a soul. Inspired by Tong Jun's History of Jiangnan Gardens, the layout unexpectedly took on the character of a classical garden: pavilions, terraces, towers and lodges became the reception, tea rooms, guest rooms and restaurant, linked by winding corridors whose paths first narrow and then open, with water, rock and planting inserted. The garden became the key to the whole project, maximising garden-making within technical limits and oscillating between tradition and modernity, sensation and reason. The result is a contemporary Jiangnan garden in the city, and for the designers it restored confidence in reviving traditional culture through contemporary hospitality.