Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China

DOMANI in collaboration with Times Group has completed the “Local From Yesterday-Dreamland”—a building of integrated landscape, architecture, interiors, and products in Sanxi Village in the southeastern part of the East District of Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province in China.

Local From Yesterday-Dreamland’s design has been awarded a 2021 Good Design Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

In the process of urbanization in China, most people or families have solidified into a broad middle class.

The construction of modern cities and buildings intends to show them the challenges of time and space on memory with unprecedented capacity and intensity.

Identity is becoming the main and sometimes the only meaning. People construct their meaning increasingly not based on what they’re doing but on what they are or what they believe in themselves. The same is true for space identity. People never belong to space or lie above space.

People’s intuition is to try to be part of the chaos in the space and find their own sense of existence from the chaos.

Therefore, considering and emphasizing regionalism in the perspective of globalization, the team choose handmade pottery tiles, very similar to soil, as the memory carrier of “villages,” forming unique colors and mottling under the effect of the external environment and symbiotic with nature.

In order to explore the rational return of traditional culture through the integration of locality and times, it is necessary to search for the authentic properties of materials, inject the localized “sense of soil” into the shape and profile of buildings, and derive the reconsideration of the relationship between architecture, region and nature.

Project: Local From Yesterday-Dreamland
Designers: DOMANI Architectural Co., Ltd.
Manufacturer: Times Group