Hechai Design Center

From maximum surveillance to creative freedom, the Hechai Design Center is the final building addition that culminates the urban regeneration of Hefei’s Hechai 1972 Art District, China’s first prison-to-cultural-district adaptive reuse. Conceived where a prison workshop stood, this high-density landmark not only incubates Hefei’s creative talent, but also reconciles with the site’s layered history through its distinctive facade and a massing strategy that responds to urban scale and memory.
The transformation began in 2018 after the prison’s relocation, yet its legacy persists in the site’s fraught relationship with the surrounding city. Over the past three decades, Hefei’s urban fabric grew around the prison walls, creating a stark 6-meter elevation drop along the eastern, southern, and western edges—an urban fissure that left the site sunken beneath the modern metropolis.
The masterplan strategically bridges the urban divide by terracing dense developments along the steepest edges, reconnecting the sunken site to the surrounding city. At the southwestern corner, the Hechai Design Center anchors this transformation by reimagining the podium-tower typology into a progressive stack of interlocking workplace clusters. Within this spiraling form, the tower's structural bays rhythmically expand and contract in depth as they rise to accommodate various types of workspaces – from expansive showrooms, cross-disciplinary office suites to intimate studios. Four rooftop terraces—positioned on every facade at staggered heights—carve vibrant social respites while sculpting a stepped massing. This urbanistic form terraces downward to knit the heritage district’s fabric and spirals upward to engage the CBD skyline, reconciling the urban scales of the once-sunken prison grounds with the modern metropolis—thereby repairing the urban rift through topographic mediation. The cascading arch facade pays homage to the iconic vaulted arch structures that span the prison workshops, transforming the tower into a cultural beacon that visibly reconciles the past and present.
By resolving the Hechai 1972 Art District’s terrain rift and repurposing its industrial DNA, the Hechai Design Center demonstrates how topographic mediation and historical resonance can catalyze urban reintegration.