Dong Guan Flâneur
Function: Tea House and Public Exhibition Center
Project Type: Renovation and Extension
Location: Dongguan, Guangdong
Design: 2021
Dongguan is a city shaped by speed. Over the past 30 years, it grew from fishing villages into a dense network of factories, towers, and gated communities. While this rapid development created new neighbourhoods, it also reinforced social boundaries and disconnection.
Drawing from Dongguan’s overlapping realities, this project reimagines urban infrastructure not just as background support, but as an interface where state and community meet.
Our site—a vacant sales office at the edge of a gated compound—sits in a landscape shaped by division.
In Dongguan, walls don’t just enclose homes—they separate lives. Behind fences, neighborhoods grow increasingly inward, while routes between them become harder to walk, harder to see, harder to know.
People live close, but rarely meet.
The city shares land, but not perspective. What happens on the other side of the wall is often invisible—physically and socially.
This is where we begin: with a space caught between visibility and exclusion.
Drawing became a tool for thinking. Through it, I tested how spatial boundaries could form, shift, or connect across different urban scales.
Dongguan’s city center hosts a complex patchwork of CBDs, urban villages, gated communities, and factories. These zones sit side by side, yet remain disconnected—separated by walls, lacking walkable connections, and often socially invisible to one another.
This project introduces an elevated walking network to bridge these gaps.
Following the city’s existing grid, the paths introduce transition zones that accommodate different walking speeds and rhythms. Rather than reinforce boundaries, the system proposes a new way to move across them—and understand what lies on the other side.
To address both spatial and social fragmentation, the system is built on two structures: one stable, one open. A concrete viaduct provides a continuous route across physical barriers, reconnecting split neighborhoods.
In Guangdong, morning tea is a daily ritual shared across generations. People gather in open halls, chatting about family, work — and sometimes, the city.
This project places a teahouse and a city exhibition in one space. Set between an artificial hill and the tallest tower in Dongguan, it invites both everyday life and civic imagination.
One level grounds the space in casual conversation. The other opens it to the city’s future.
Have tea.
Talk city.
Build public voice.
Talk city.
Build public voice.
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