Online ISSN 2759-8594 (ID: waca Password: waca12345) Print ISSN 2436-4649 Journal of World Chinese Architects is an academic journal organized by the World Association of Chinese Architects (WACA) . it is an international professional journal with a collection of thematic papers, theoretical research, architectural design, and interviews with architects. Since its inception in 2023, it has included the architectural works and research results of Chinese architects and research scholars in the world. In the future, it will be based on the international vision and continue to explore the cutting-edge theories and design practices in the field of architecture.
JWACA2025-041: 20 Years of The World Association of Chinese Architects
This report outlines the core mission and activities of the World Association of Chinese Architects (WACA) over the past two decades. It positions WACA as a pivotal platform for global Chinese architects, facilitating the exhibition of creative work and scholarly exchange through forums, seminars, and awards. Central to its mission is the responsibility to inherit and promote Chinese architectural culture, imbuing built works with profound cultural significance. The association is committed to driving innovation within the field by fostering dialogue among architects with diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, it emphasizes a social responsibility to improve living environments and create human-centric spaces. WACA also dedicates itself to mentoring the next generation of architects through education and opportunity. Finally, while rooted in Chinese culture, its mission extends to promoting the integration of diverse global architectural cultures, seeking collaborative exchanges to contribute to a harmonious and vibrant international architectural community.
JWACA2025-040: The "Southeast Asian Architectural Culture" Exchange Conference of Waca Was Held in Singapore
This report summarizes the "Southeast Asian Architectural Culture" exchange forum organized by the World Association of Chinese Architects (WACA) in Singapore in February 2025. Hosted in collaboration with Surbana Jurong Group, the event featured keynote presentations from academics and practitioners on the historical evolution and sustainable future of Southeast Asian architecture. The program included site visits to institutions like the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority and Nanyang Technological University, as well as bilateral talks with the Singapore Institute of Architects. The forum aimed to strengthen academic and professional networks among Chinese architects globally, focusing on design innovation and cultural dialogue within the Southeast Asian context.
JWACA2025-039: The 3rd（Enlarged）Meeting of the 7th Standing Council of WACA Was Held in Jinan
This document records the proceedings of the Third Expanded Meeting of the Seventh Standing Council of the World Association of Chinese Architects (WACA), held in Jinan on October 26, 2024. The meeting, hosted by the Shandong Provincial Architectural Design & Research Institute Co., Ltd., included a work report from the secretariat, deliberations on the "WACA20 Years Award" nominees, and extensive discussions on the association's developmental strategies and future direction. Chaired by President Zhang Lingling, the session facilitated strategic dialogue among council members, honorary members, and trustees to guide WACA's ongoing mission and operations.
JWACA2025-038: Annual Conference of The World Chinese Architects Association ,The 20th Founding Anniversary and Academic Forum: "Tracing the Roots and Exploring New Horizons"
This document reports on the 20th-anniversary forum and ceremony of the World Association of Chinese Architects (WACA), held in Jinan, China, in October 2024. It details the commemorative events, including the unveiling of a commemorative seal, the presentation of the "WACA20 Years Award" to key contributors, and the launch of a special journal issue and retrospective exhibition. The narrative highlights WACA's founding mission to unite Chinese architects globally and promote Chinese architectural culture, paying tribute to foundational figures such as I.M. Pei (honorary founding member) and Pan Zuyao (founding president). The ceremony served to reaffirm the association's commitment to fostering innovation and cultural exchange within the global Chinese architectural community.
JWACA2025-037: Interview with Mr. Zhang Xianfeng：“listening to your words”
This interview recounts Professor Zhang Xianfeng's practical journey in historic city planning, beginning with the 1995 Changshu project. It emphasizes solving the fundamental conflict between conservation and development through spatial strategies, public participation, and nuanced policy formulation. The narrative extends to projects in Dali, Yan'an, and Harbin, illustrating the adaptation of planning principles to diverse regional contexts—from revolutionary sites to colonial-era urban fabric. Zhang reflects on the concept of "cultural genes," advocating for place-specific conservation that protects authenticity, integrates modern needs, and revitalizes historic areas through compatible new functions, while warning against simplistic stylistic imitation.
JWACA2025-036: Interview with Ms. Shao Yong：“listening to your words”
This interview details Professor Shao Yong's formative experiences in China's heritage conservation field under the mentorship of Professor Ruan Yisan. It traces the development of conservation planning from the pioneering 1981 Pingyao plan, which established the "old-new separation" model, to the detailed planning of living historic towns like Zhouzhuang in the 1990s. The narrative highlights the translation of international concepts and the scholarly groundwork that led to establishing key principles—authenticity, integrity, and continuity of life—for historic districts. It underscores the role of academic institutions like Tongji University in shaping national technical standards and the conceptual shift towards "human settlement heritage."
JWACA2025-035: Introduction to the Column“Listening to Your Words”
This column introduction outlines the three-stage evolution of China's urban heritage conservation system since 1949, framed within the tension between rapid modernization and cultural preservation. The first stage (1949-1982) explored the protection of monuments and ancient cities. The second stage (1982-2016) saw parallel development along three tracks: cultural relics, Historic and Cultural Cities (HCC), and World Heritage, leading to more diversified planning. The third stage (2016-present) focuses on integrating conservation into the national territorial spatial planning system. The column, through interviews with leading scholars and practitioners, aims to document the collective memory and localized wisdom developed over four decades of practice.
JWACA2025-034: Zaoyungu Rural Art Museum Homestay
This project adapts a 1960s rammed-earth farmhouse in a bamboo valley near Hangzhou into a combined art museum and homestay. The design preserves the original structure while introducing contemporary elements and local materials like stone, bamboo, and wood. It creates a hybrid space that connects past and present, focusing on a naturalistic and poetic aesthetic. The venue supports art exhibitions, cultural events, and rural tourism, operating as a social and creative hub that merges artistic residency with commercial sustainability in a scenic setting.
JWACA2025-033: Waterfront Tearoom in Daqiao-He Park
This tearoom is located within a riverside park in Ganzhou. The design minimizes site intervention by preserving existing trees and following topographic contours to create a low-lying, linear form that blends into the landscape. The building provides light catering and services, with multi-level terraces and platforms that enhance connectivity to the water and park. Green roofs compensate for the occupied ground area, and visual corridors are maintained to preserve views, resulting in a building that dissolves into its natural context.
Zhuoting Plaza is a mixed-use complex in Qingdao, integrating office, residential, and public service functions. Notably, it is the city's first high-rise building using exposed fair-faced concrete as the primary façade material, chosen for its durability in the coastal saline and acid rain environment. The "E"-shaped layout creates a gradient from public to private spaces, improving urban connectivity and pedestrian flow. Over time, the concrete has aged gracefully, demonstrating a sustainable approach that combines material honesty, climatic resilience, and timeless aesthetics.
JWACA2025-031: Digital China Exhibition Center
This exhibition and conference center in Fuzhou explores the concept of the city and architecture as integrated containers in the digital age. Designed as a prefabricated steel structure, it functions as a "quantum unit" where exhibition and conference spaces balance and complement each other. The architectural form responds to the coastal urban context, featuring a digital-inspired façade and an entrance organized around repetitive units and focal points. The design aims to seamlessly connect interior and exterior spaces, supporting fluid public movement and activity.
JWACA2025-030: The Center Of The Hushan Reservoir Ruins
Located near a prehistoric archaeological site in Taiwan, this center serves as a community and ecological museum. The building follows the steep terrain with minimal disturbance, using a concrete base and a large-span timber structure to create a bridge-like form. The design organizes circulation to guide visitors upward through a sequence of spaces—from a sheltered plaza to exhibition areas—offering views of the ruins and landscape. The double-layered façade enhances climatic performance, creating a small-scale, environmentally responsive local museum.
JWACA2025-029: Honghe Hani Rice Terraces School
This project constructs a preservation and education school within the UNESCO-listed Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan. The design adopts a light-touch approach, dividing the building into two volumes to minimize visual impact and blend with the local village scale. It metaphorically reflects the terraced landscape and the "four-element" ecological structure (forest, water, village, terraces), using local materials and construction wisdom to create spaces for exhibition, training, and cultural transmission, fostering dialogue between architecture and agricultural heritage.
JWACA2025-028: Linyi Olympic Sports Center
The Linyi Olympic Sports Center is a large-scale urban sports and cultural complex comprising a stadium, gymnasium, swimming and diving hall, a public fitness center, and a cultural center. Designed to host national sports events and cultural performances, it aims to create a new landmark centered on sports and wellness for the northern new town. The project integrates multiple public functions, advanced facilities, and sustainable planning to support both elite competitions and community recreation, promoting an active urban lifestyle.
JWACA2025-027: Urban Renewal Project of Tongzhou Beishan Hotel
This renovation of a 1980s hotel in Tongzhou preserves its Jiangnan garden layout while upgrading facilities and spatial organization. Guided by a “gene recombination” concept, the project retains historical character but introduces modern technology and operations, allowing continuous use during construction. The outcome is a revitalized venue that balances heritage conservation with contemporary functional demands.
JWACA2025-026: Hong Kong Land Chongqing Qiyuan and Qiyuan Guangli
A mixed-use complex in Chongqing’s hilly terrain, this project combines commercial, office, and residential programs. Through terraced gardens and stepped circulation, it mediates a 13-meter height difference, creating slow-paced retail experiences and efficient TOD connectivity. Rounded architectural forms unify the composition, reflecting the mountainous context and enhancing urban coherence.
JWACA2025-025: Xiangfu Bridge Historic District Renewal
This urban renewal in Hangzhou preserves the historic fabric while introducing contemporary community functions. Through typological analysis of traditional spaces, the design integrates courtyards, lanes, and waterfront activity zones, adding new bridges, a school, and elderly care facilities. The project revitalizes the district as a lively, permeable neighborhood while protecting cultural heritage.
JWACA2025-024: Hangzhou WENSLI Science and Innovation Center
This headquarters campus for a silk enterprise features three buildings enclosing a shared courtyard. The façade employs a double-layer curtain wall with overlapping diagonal patterns, evoking silk weaving. A central arched lobby serves as a flexible event space. The design balances functional office layouts with symbolic architectural expression, reflecting the company’s cultural identity.
JWACA2025-023: Beijing Yizhuang Cell Therapy Research and Development Pilot Base
As China’s largest cell therapy industry base, this project organizes eight GMP-standard buildings around a three-dimensional “vitality corridor” that encourages interaction and movement. The design metaphorically extends cellular morphology into landscape and circulation, fostering an open, interconnected research park that blends rational layout with dynamic public spaces.
JWACA2025-022: Hedong New Town, Liaoyang City Nine-Year Continuous School
This modern school in Liaoyang adopts a “dual-core” layout to separate yet connect middle and elementary sections. Shared daylight corridors and multi-layered indoor-outdoor spaces create an open, interactive learning environment. The landscape design integrates seasonal elements to support experiential education, forming an ecological campus that meets high-standard educational and developmental needs.
JWACA2025-021: Nanshan Kindergarten in Lianping
Nanshan Kindergarten in Guangdong’s old urban area, it designs of creates semi-outdoor spaces and a climate-responsive envelope to accommodate children’s activities. Through stepped terraces and arched stone portals, it reduces the building’s scale and blends with the historic context. The project serves as both a educational facility and a cultural landmark, promoting green, low-carbon operation.
JWACA2025-020: Qingdao Youth Football Stadium
As Shandong’s first large professional football stadium, Qingdao Youth Football Stadium features a cable-supported long-span roof and integrates a training hall, swimming pool, and commercial facilities. Designed with a dynamic, wave-like concept reflecting Qingdao’s coastal identity, it meets international standards for major events while functioning as a public sports park. Innovative materials and smart systems ensure sustainability and urban connectivity.
Located in Wuhan, this building draws inspiration from the local metasequoia forest, abstracting its form into the façade and spatial design. Using fritted glass and a slender tree-like steel structure, the architecture blurs the boundary with nature while providing solar shading. The design combines artistic expression with technical performance, incorporating siphon drainage and energy-efficient glazing to enhance comfort and sustainability.
JWACA2025-018: Qingdao Inspur Big Data Center
This project designs a big data R&D center in Qingdao’s dense old urban area, emphasizing integration with the existing community. It addresses strict constraints on density, traffic, daylight, and noise through rational massing derived from solar analysis, pedestrian-friendly pathways, and an external shading system. The design balances technological function with human scale and sustainable principles, aiming to revitalize the historic neighborhood while fostering a low-carbon, interconnected working environment.
JWACA2025-017: The Value Characteristics of Street Space in Qingdao during the German Concession Period from a Holistic Perspective
The overall value cognition promotes the systematic protection of urban cultural heritage, and also comprehensively explores and inherits the wisdom of historical planning. Taking the streets in the core urban area of Qingdao during the German concession period as an example, starting from the overall urban planning and design, this paper reviews the construction process and influencing factors of street space, defines the landscape characteristics and value features of street space architecture, and constructs a theory of overall protection and inheritance of street space.
JWACA2025-016: Rural Stock Renewal and Study on the Design of Bamboo Landscape Activation in Southern Sichuan—— Take Lifeng Shan Huang and Its Landscape Environment Remediation as an Example
This paper integrates the rural landscape environment in southern Sichuan with local bamboo culue. In the era of stock update, through design improvements, new vitality is injected into the countryside. Taking "Lifeng Shan Zhuang" as an example, the study explores the use of bamboo elements in human settlement environments and landscapes, analyzes the data using the semantic differential method (SD method), and investigates how to apply bamboo culture to characteristic landscape design in rural construction. The aim is to create a high-quality, locally distinctive rural bamboo art-themed landscape environment, in order to achieve the goals of rural revitalization and sustainable development.
JWACA2025-015: Research on Urban Water Resilience Guided by System Science Research Paradigms
Under the dual pressures of global climate change and rapid urbanization, urban water systems face multifaceted crises including water scarcity, frequent extreme hydrological events, and ecosystem degradation. Conventional engineering-dominated water management paradigms have demonstrated inadequacy in addressing these systemic risks. This study establishes a theoretical framework and methodological system for urban water resilience research, based on the paradigm shift in systems science. The investigation reveals that the "Three Waves" of systems science in the 20th century laid the methodological foundation for water resilience research, facilitating its transition from single-hazard response to complex social-ecological system governance. By integrating six critical dimensions—risk, disaster, carrying capacity, ecology, infrastructure, and governance—this work achieves three transformative advancements in urban water resilience understanding: (1) a theoretical shift from static equilibrium to dynamic multistability, (2) a methodological transition from unidimensional optimization to multiscale coupling, and (3) a practical evolution from engineering dominance to socio-ecological synergy. As a representative social-ecological complex adaptive system (SES-CAS), urban water systems develop resilience through tri-scale synergistic mechanisms. The proposed nested analytical framework provides theoretical tools to decouple the negative feedback loop of "climate change-urban expansion-water system degradation," while offering practical strategies to advance SDG 6 and SDG 11.
JWACA2025-014: Construction and Optimization of Ecological Corridor in the Hilly Area of East Shandong
In recent years, rapid urban expansion in the Hilly Area of East Shandong has led to an increasingly serious problem of habitat fragmentation, resulting in a decline in landscape connectivity. These changes pose a significant threat to the survival space of species and the stability of ecosystems in the region. In this study, various methods such as InVEST, Maxent, Zonation 5, MCR model, and circuit theory were comprehensively applied to systematically assess and spatially analyze the ecosystem service capacity, species potential fitness zones, prioritized protection areas, and ecological networks in the study area from multiple dimensions. The results showed that a total of 3017.6 km2 of ecological source area was identified; 257 first-level ecological corridors, 167 second-level, and 95 third-level ecological corridors were delineated; 94 ecological keypoints, with a combined area of 52.7 km2, were identified; as well as 93 ecological breakpoints, covering an area of 93.4 km2. The ecological network constructed in this study enhances the ecological connectivity of the region, and the use of Zonation to identify priority conservation areas provides a new perspective for ecological network c onstruction, and a reference that can be used for ecological source identification.
JWACA2025-013: Research on Post Occupancy Evaluation（POE）of the Upgrading and Optimization Strategy of the Ba Daju Market
Implementing urban renewal actions, strengthening urban infrastructure construction, and building livable, resilient, and smart cities are important deployments made by the Party's 20th National Congress. As a place with the most fireworks atmosphere in residents' life, the convenience market reflects the city's city culture and is a link for community residents to communicate, but at present, some convenience markets still have various problems such as old service facilities and unreasonable spatial layout. This paper takes the convenience market as the research object, takes the users of the convenience market as the evaluation subject, adopts the method of free interview, behavior observation and questionnaire as the research methods, and determines the evaluation factor system in the questionnaire through text mining, which is divided into three levels: spatial environment, traffic organization and market characteristics. Text and data generated during the research process are collected and sorted out. Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is used to summarize the data. Finally, existing problems of convenience market are summarized and updated and optimized strategies are proposed. To provide multiple ideas and scientific basis for the renovation of the convenience market.
JWACA2025-012: Research Status and Development Trends of Urban Ecological Resilience Based on CiteSpace
Urban resilience, as a core issue in addressing climate change, natural disasters, and urbanization risks, has become a key research direction in urban planning, ecological security, and public management in recent years. With the frequent occurrence of extreme events worldwide, how to enhance the resilience, adaptation, and recovery capabilities of urban systems through theoretical innovation and practical exploration has become a hot topic of concern for both academia and policy circles. This study takes domestic and foreign literature on urban resilience as the object, systematically sorts out the research context and knowledge evolution in this field, aiming to reveal its development trend and provide theoretical support for subsequent research. At the level of literature review, foreign research has formed a relatively complete theoretical system and made significant progress in resilience assessment models, multi-scale coupling mechanisms, and digital technology applications. Although domestic research started relatively late, it has shown clear policy orientation and intensive case studies, focusing on localized issues such as resilient urban planning standards and public safety resilience improvement. It has also accumulated rich results in empirical research in urban agglomerations such as the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta. This article is based on CiteSpace software to conduct scientific graph analysis of literature in Web of Science (WOS) and CNKI databases. Through the visualization of annual publication trends, keyword co-occurrence clustering, author collaboration networks, and institutional distribution characteristics, the evolution laws of disciplines and the migration of research hotspots are revealed.