Tao Yiqiu Memorial Hall

The Tao Yiqiu Memorial Hall in Luojia Town, Kunshan, designed by Chen Yifeng and Ma Danhong with structural engineers from Hezuo Studio and Tongjian and MEP engineers for the Luojia Town government, was relocated in 2020 from its old site to Tao's birthplace, Xiaqiao Community, because of nearby metro construction. Tao Yiqiu, born in 1905 to a landowning family in Xiaqiao, raised Kunshan's first anti-Japanese armed force in 1939 and sold his family's land to fund it. The new hall sits in a semi-enclosed gap among three community service buildings, on an east-west rectangular plot with a messy surrounding context. The brief was deliberately loose: up to 1,000 square meters, enough to house the few original artifacts and two statues from the old hall. The design treats the memorial as a place of memory and transmission, anchored in ordinary humanity rather than propaganda. Two enclosing walls of different heights separate the memorial's territory from the community buildings beyond visitors' sight. Inside, five themed spaces, front court, main courtyard,, exhibition hall and sculpture court, are arranged along the depth of the site as a progressive sequence that peels visitors away from everyday life. The visitor path doubles back in an S around the main axis, lengthening the tour within a small plot and allowing turns to reframe each space; visual exits are organized independently of the circulation so that the whole experience is a layering of temporal and spatial perception. The design emphasizes horizontality through the depth of the site, then plays with the frontality and symmetry of the halls, the mass and its lightness, and the centripetal and centrifugal pull of the courts, so that the memorial suggests quiet movement within a measured dignity. From a single propagandistic exhibition room, the project expands into a calm, slightly transcendent field projected toward sky and grass slope, doubling as a meditation garden for the Xiaqiao community. It asks visitors not to gaze at the building, but to gaze inward.