The Underwood Library is located in the QianShao village in the north of Chongming Island, 41 years after the reclamation began in 1968. The government’s intention is to develop a new cultural economy on Chongming Island in the form of ‘art tourism’.
We were commissioned by the government to build a new library on the site of a dilapidated primary school building that had fallen into disrepair and had become a dangerous building.

When we first visited the site in May 2020, we were attracted by the large forest of seedlings in Outpost Bay. Walking through it, one can feel a closeness to nature that is rarely found in city life.

” How to express abstraction with figuration and how to make people feel the natural mood through the architectural atmosphere”

The design attempts to translate this ambience in the woods into an architectural scene, making a connection between nature and architecture in the transformation from figurative to abstract.