Annuo Xincheng Nursing Home | LYCS Architecture

Located on Jiefang Road in uptown Hangzhou, the Anno Xincheng Wellness Center is an exemplary new generation of comprehensive building facilities for healthy aging. The overall form of the building is rigorous, with a touch of liveliness. The stepped pure white building responds to the complex surrounding site environment with a design strategy of stacking. The project injects new vitality into the old city of Hangzhou and is expected to provide a new type of wellness facility for high-density urban areas when it opens.

New home of old Hangzhou
The buildings around the project, such as Daxue Yuan, Gaoguan Alley, Hangzhou No. 2, and No.7 Middle School, were mostly built in the 1980s and 1990s. In such a densely developed urban fabric, designing a building volume of 43,160 square meters is like dancing the tango in a minefield. Sunlight conditions, urban landscape, and building volume all deserve surgical care.

The site was originally two office buildings of Zhongwei Corp. In 2014, the client decided to demolish it and build a new building on the original site. It was expected to meet the office's demand while adding the function of nursing and wellness to seek more development possibilities. But the ratio between office and wellness was not determined then.

Stacking mountain in the city
According to the urban environment and the client's demands, the architects proposed the design concept of "Stacking urban mountain", in which new building is stacked together like a bunch of boxes in a high-density neighborhood. The architecture gradually rising in the direction from east to west, forming open space of terraces with staggered heights, overlooking both at the old and new city.

Instead of the conventional solution of two buildings for the two programs, the architects opted for a singular building with continuous floor plan leaving enough room for flexible division of office, healthcare and other functions. The sufficient variability would allow the owner to deal with the unpredictable market more comfortably. Eight years later, this decision proved to be correct when the client decided to introduce a professional medical institution to focus on wellness, and became Anno Xincheng Wellness Center.

A three-dimensional care experience
The urban fabric of the old city is dense and small-scale, despite the cascading terraces, the building is still a continuous volume of more than 100 meters. The design team added a sense of hierarchy to the facade through balconies, vertical greenery and other designs, breaking the 44-meter-high and 11-meter-wide building facade into seven small-scale square boxes. This will bring the scale closer to the community and reducing the oppressive feeling of the building.

The building has six landscape terraces from the 6th to the 11th floors, with a close view of the old Hangzhou marketplace on both sides of the Liusha River and a distant view of the modern skyline of Qianjiang New Town, bringing a unique recreational experience by living in the downtown area and being detached from the city. The largest square-shaped sky garden of nearly 500 square meters is rarely seen in the old town, opening up the imagination for future use. Landscape design and interior design are being developed simultaneously.