GAC Living Area Public Rental Housing Project‌

Centred on the vision of "Building a New Blueprint for Blue-Collar Living Communities," the design unfolds across three dimensions: Design Concept, Design Strategy, and Design Highlights.

Design Concept: The design rekindles the warmth of "compound culture" (Da Yuan Wen Hua), breaking through the alienation and monotony of factory life to rebuild social bonds within the affordable housing community—where coworkers are also neighbours—recovering the sense of human connection remembered from the past. It returns to human-centred needs, drawing lessons from the Foxconn incident to focus on the mental well-being of blue-collar workers, and seeks the greatest common denominator between the mechanical rigidity of work and the relaxed ease of life. Responding to the "Good Housing" policy framework, it is guided by safety, comfort, greenness, and smartness, setting a new benchmark for pragmatist aesthetics—pursuing the warmth of past communal life while embedding modern functional scenes.

Design Strategy: Led by five core values—Practical Functionalism (site-research-driven spatial design), Long-term Effectiveness (low-maintenance materials and native species), Community Scene Creation (six functional scene modules), Participatory Sponge City (7,660 m² of sunken green space and rain gardens), and High-quality Modularisation (Lego-inspired open-interface free assembly)—the scheme establishes four major systems—Homecoming, Function, Ecology, and Smart Technology—comprising 22 functional modules in total. These form a spatial structure of "one axis, one loop, two belts, and six clusters," with costs tiered across three levels (essential, recommended, and preferred) to ensure flexible cost control.

Design Highlights: A 550 m circular smart track equipped with AI-sensing lighting and interactive floor tiles; a 440 m wind-and-rain corridor ensuring comfortable homecoming in extreme weather; four themed ground-floor open spaces (e-sports / adult fitness / party gathering / general use) achieving indoor-outdoor spatial permeation; an integrated Order Gate combining shuttle bus connections, parcel and food delivery, and information display; a triple-activation strategy for fire truck access zones that softens hard surfaces; and a waterfront slow-mobility cultural belt crafted through light-touch intervention to create a living, evolving ecological promenade.