Golden A' Design Award Winner 2025
Dongtou Passenger Port Cruise Terminal by Pengfei He represents a distinguished achievement within the evolving tradition of maritime civic architecture, wherein the designer appears to engage meaningfully with both the phenomenological experience of threshold crossing and the ecological imperative of landscape-sensitive intervention, the work participating in contemporary discourse surrounding biomorphic parametric design while simultaneously honoring vernacular coastal building traditions through its scaled, clustered massing that suggests natural geological accretion rather than imposed geometric order, technically the composition demonstrates sophisticated understanding of processional sequence as visitors would experience gradual revelation moving from forested arrival zones through intermediate gathering plazas toward the culminating waterfront pavilions, the chromatic strategy employing deliberate restraint that allows architectural form to achieve prominence through shape and shadow rather than surface embellishment, the three primary pavilion structures seem to reference both maritime imagery of billowing sails and natural phenomena of wave-smoothed stones, creating what might be termed a productive ambiguity that invites multiple interpretive frameworks, formally the curvilinear promenade functions as connective tissue binding discrete programmatic elements into unified experiential narrative while the floating pier extensions establish rhythmic counterpoint through their orthogonal geometry, the work suggests thoughtful meditation on the symbolic significance of departure and arrival spaces as liminal zones where terrestrial certainty gives way to maritime possibility, one might observe how the deliberate preservation of substantial forest buffer demonstrates ecological sensitivity positioning the terminal as guest within its landscape rather than dominant intervention, how does this careful negotiation between human infrastructure and natural systems reshape our understanding of what civic architecture might aspire to achieve in an era of environmental consciousness?
Located at Tantoushan Bay in Dongtou, the site serves as a link between urban and scenic areas. Inspired by the concept of Symbiosis of Mountain and Sea, terraced setback buildings and green slopes are designed. They blend the mountain and sea elements to craft a three dimensional space. It connects the mountains and the coastline longitudinally, and incorporates an 800meter commercial waterfront belt transversely. Vertically, it zones the transport, commercial, and ecological corridors, forming a low carbon symbiotic entity.