Suzhou Conference Hotel
Princeton University.
Mario Gandelsonas, Instructor. 2004
This project included the design of a building within a larger urban revitalization project, the nature of which was also to be outlined as part of the project. A large area of an older residential quarter of Shuzou, China was slated for demolition. The Conference Hotel program was seen as an opportunity to engage the local population with visiting business people who where bolstering the city’s economy. Perhaps both populations could benefit from each other? Could the new urban quarter learn from the old one without attempting to replicate it?
The public amenities of a hotel (theater, swimming pools, meeting rooms, etc) are often only used for short portions of the day by visiting business people. This was seen as an oppurtunity for the building to provide services and amenitites to the community that would begin to create an interdependence between the two communities of local and visitor. In that vein, a public path weaves its way through the building to give locals controlled access to these amenities, eventually arriving on a large roof-garden.
The cellular nature of the hotel is distrurbed by this intervention. Direct vertical circluation allows visitors to proceed directly to their rooms, or they too can use the more picturesque path connecting the ameneties, allowing the building to be experienced in two very different ways.
In service of interewaving the local and the visitor, the urban plan weaves the building into a new context that is a reinterpretation of the maze-like courtyard housing that dominates the neighborhood. Blocks are broken into jagged alleyways and courtyards, and a wide, bridge-like plaza connects the hotel to the neighborhood, allowing vehicular traffic to pass below. The plan also included creating spaces for community gardens that would supply the hotel’s restaurant. Other activities that could integrate the hotel into the economic and social, as well as architectural, fabric of the city were planned in other areas.
The project was interested in investigating how development could help support a culturally rich but financially impoverished neighborhood rather than try to supplant it.
