Sky Court Leisure Center_Sanya > China

The design of the leisure center for the chinese tropical city of Sanya, Hainan, starts by saving the two abandoned concrete skeletons, whilst defining the ground as a permeable platform, excavated and/or lifted in multiple ways to reach the basement and first floor in order to create a network of patios and pathways, along with a new hierarchy of accesses.Such an emerging triangulated environment encourages the distribution of the new functional program to be hosted in the two existing and further renovated buildings (lounge-restaurant, karaoke, guest rooms in building 1 and lounge-restaurant, photography area, wedding consultancy offices, beauty salon in building 2 and to extend it right into these external areas. The existing concrete skeletons undergo a radical transformation: new prefab modules are inserted into them and an entirely new glass skin is put in place. The façade is kept open in many points to allow natural light and fresh air into the core and to ensure that all rooms and offices enjoy a double exposure, crucial in the island’s ecosystem. Those modules, built out of wood and glass panels, come from an automatized supply chain of industrially manufactured objects and match the logic of assembled products.