Yantai Chunhui Road Parking

Chunhui Road in Laishan district, Yantai, was originally an area of education and light industry, home to Yantai University, Shandong Technology and Business University and institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Recent urban development has turned the area into the centre of Laishan; most factories have moved away, leaving many vacant industrial buildings. The Chunhui Road Bo'eryu site lies within this updating former industrial area and contains three existing buildings that were formerly offices, warehouses and plant rooms of a factory. The brief was to convert this small compound into a vibrant, shared youth residential community. Yantai is a typical northern coastal city: mountainous, sunny and with an exceptionally long coastline. The design team wanted to work from the city's character, giving the youth apartments a distinctive architectural tone appropriate to the seaside city and offering the high-quality shared-community lifestyle sought by young people today. On Chunhui Road to the north, two rows of mature street trees almost completely screen the building's street-facing elevation, while to the east the site opens onto the green grounds of a training school. The architects therefore boldly reversed the primary and secondary facade: the east side, facing the open ground, becomes the main front. The ground floor opens up to the east as the living room and public activity space of the whole apartment community. The east gables of the three existing buildings are unified with a continuous square-grid language that becomes the main external identity of the residence. The original three-storey building to the north had a shallow plan; to produce comfortable dwelling units, an external corridor was added. The result is an adaptive reuse that turns an abandoned factory compound into a lively, shared home for young residents while respecting the industrial character of the site.