Suzhou Bache Community Center / Dedang Design

"Let's make a roof where we can see the sunset and the Grand Canal", a simple and slightly exciting sentence when the site was first surveyed in the spring of 2020, sent a beautiful vision of the community center at the beginning of the design. Located on the old street of Bache in Wujiang, Suzhou, just a ten-minute walk from the canal, the community center is actually the first in a series of micro-renewals of the old street. The main motivation for the micro-renewal of the street was the upcoming completion of the future campus of Soochow University across the canal, and the leader proposed to turn Bache Street into an Academy Town, expecting the future students to become a new force in the street, bringing new opportunities for the renewal of the street. With such expectations, the small community center, as a public activity space, becomes a key vehicle for the integration of the old and the new, and it is no exaggeration to say that a small building takes on a big mission. We often joked later that this was a house with ambition.