London Design Silver

2025

NOT A PLACE

Entrant

Yilin Zhang + Yixuan Liu

Category

Architectural Design - Biophilic

Client's Name

Country / Region

United States

Not a place, but a state of being.

What we build is neither a place nor a “destination.” It is more like the site of a journey. One that begins with the body, passes through the senses, and returns to the soul.

Here, people do not “move into a building,” but instead “enter into themselves.”

Starting from the senses, we designed a series of spaces to awaken the body’s instinctive responses to the environment: touch, smell, hearing, temperature… each sense gradually awakened in different spaces.

In this process, architecture steps back while nature comes to the foreground. It is wind, light, temperature, earth, and time that truly shape rhythm and emotion. Architecture is only the vessel of perception.

To respond to remote terrain, extreme climate, and the principle of minimal intervention, we use thickened shipping containers as the primary wall system—solid, transportable, recyclable, and carrying a kind of “rough aesthetics” born of industrial civilization.

These containers are not placed in isolation but supported within a lightweight column grid. The roof, made of GFRC panels, joins the grid to form an assemblable and detachable shelter. Light in weight yet structurally precise, it resists heavy wind and rain while allowing light and air to flow freely.

Every wall, column, and roof plate serves a single purpose: to return architecture to its essential states—shelter, enclosure, openness, connection.

We reject the binary of “architecture vs. landscape.”

Here, architecture is no longer the protagonist but a collaborator with nature. Roofs extend into mountains; platforms grow along rocks; walls open to prevailing winds so that air itself becomes part of the design.

Architecture and landscape merge into each other, dissolving boundaries, becoming two parts of the same body. Interior and exterior, artificial and natural, eternal and temporary—all blur into continuity.

Through this, people slowly and profoundly reconnect with nature and re-become part of the world.

Credits

Yixuan Liu
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