Zhongshan Greater Bay Area Center Exhibition Hall

A mountain is only a geological accident; it does not intend to kill or to please, and all the emotional attributes of mountains are projected by human imagination, as Robert Macfarlane writes in Mountains of the Mind. The translucent Greater Bay Area Center Exhibition Hall, called the Flying Red Mountain, designed by Wutopia Lab for the Vanke-Shenye Future Gate Wanzhong New City project, opened in July 2022. It sits on the west bank of the Pearl River Delta, at the western gateway of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link, on the waterfront frontage of Wanzhong New City. On clear days, the roof offers a direct view across the sea to the spectacular high-rises of Shenzhen Qianhai. This ambitious exhibition hall is a new landmark floating by the sea. A sales exhibition center is one of the few remaining holds of architecture for developers with aspirations in an increasingly involuted market. Decades of real-estate boom and competition have made Chinese residential buildings converge in plan and facade, yet sales centers, as image projects that improve customer experience, have received increasing attention, evolving from pure sales functions to lifestyle display and, later, to community centers or commercial complexes for residents. For a long time, sales centers themselves began to look alike, until the rise of social media made developers realize that the exhibition center could serve as an important visual medium driving property influence and sales, requiring innovative, distinctive design. The demonstration zone of the new city where the exhibition hall sits has had all original site information erased by the seven-connections-and-leveling process; mature, smooth demonstration-zone designs, after stripping limited architectural variation, look alike across Chinese new towns: the Generic City. Faced with the Generic City, the designer had a radical idea: to make a black BDO, a Big Dumb Object, that reflects its surroundings. It symbolizes the unknown, mysterious, immense power, resisting complexity and craftsmanship with a concise, pure, vivid image. Silent, cold, and enormous, it draws attention from every direction and from online discourse; without words, everyone understands that it is the starting point for visiting the new city and the anti-Generic-City ambition. The reason for choosing a BDO is to ignite the client's adventurous spirit: most new towns are functional spillovers of central cities, yet the Vanke project aspires to build a new city with central-city functions. Any verbal vision is pale; only an impactful idea can represent courage, and courage is what ordinary people lack most. The BDO is courage. The scheme was initially rejected by authorities for lacking local cultural character. The designer refused to drape a modern functional volume in so-called traditional clothing or a patched rewrite of tradition, refused to combine traditional materials such as rammed earth and timber under the name of locality, and refused to exhaust local archives to directly architecturize or repeatedly rewrite local flora, fauna, and artifacts.