Wanning-Zhengda Sun River Coffee Town Art Center

Completed in 2024 on a former overseas-Chinese coffee plantation in Xinglong, Wanning, Hainan, the Yushan Lanfeng Art Centre for the CP Sun River Coffee Town is designed by Wutopia Lab under lead architect Yu Ting, with landscape by Chongqing WTD, project manager Mu Zhilin, project architects Zhan Bodi, Guo Yuchen and Yang Siqi, and built by Beijing Zhongtianjiu Membrane Structure and China Railway Construction. The project came to Yu Ting when the previous architect's scheme had failed to satisfy the client, and he was constrained by an already-constructed basement: he could not change the beam-and-slab structure, the new building could not exceed the original design loads, and it had to stay within the building line. The site's history touched him deeply: the plantation had been cleared from jungle by Indonesian overseas Chinese expelled in the anti-Chinese purges, whose return and reclamation created China's coffee industry. Asked by the client that the town would be better if it faced the sea, Yu Ting decided to invent one. Taking the Chinese fairy-tale motif of a single pond with three mountains, he kept the original three buildings as the three mountains, building the side wings as reception and office and the central block as the art centre, and excavated an artificial sea in front of the main mountain. A boardwalk leads across the water into the hall, where the tide seems to flow in, and two routes climb the mountain: one via a coffee reception area, open negotiation zone, second-floor overseas-Chinese culture exhibition and outdoor terrace connected by sky bridge to the side wings, and another via grand stairs, lift and third-floor multi-function hall, both meeting on the roof, which conceals a small coffee garden overlooking the town. To unify the three functionally different volumes, Yu Ting wraps each in a semi-transparent cover, a lightweight Ferrari membrane with three perforation rates that increase in transparency from bottom to top, forming a translucent mountain silhouette. The cover is deliberately detached from the building's climate boundary, producing a shaded grey space between the two envelopes, a research interest of the studio. At night, lighting turns the white membrane mountain into a colour-shifting lamp mountain, while inside the main hall a high-saturation red light against blue recalls Mark Rothko, a moment of immediate sacredness. The whole scheme is framed as a super-text that combines memory, legend, myth, constraint, pandemic-era uncertainty, ambition and hope, and as an event in which architecture itself acts as media.