Jiangnan House Yangzhou Guangling transforms the former Subei Cinema and its surrounding parcels in Guangling Old Town into a hotel, articulated as a sequence of gardens, courts, and covered passages. Adaptive reuse of timber heritage fabric, careful renovation of mid-20th-century brick and concrete blocks, and two restrained new volumes in reinforced concrete re-stitch the heterogeneous urban grain while retaining plot subdivisions, alley alignments, and the layered spatial logic of Yangzhou’s courtyard culture.
Jiangnan House, Yangzhou Guangling Technical Information
- Architects: B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio
- Location: Guangling Road, Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, China
- Gross Area: 4250 m2 | 45,747 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2023 – 2025
- Photographs: © Xia Zhi
We approached the site as a field of gardens and corridors, allowing the cinema hall to become a pavilion within a larger sequence. Preservation of the timber structure and calibrated new frames make the city’s memory legible while enabling contemporary use.
– Shuhei Aoyama
Urban Context and Renewal Strategy
The project operates within the compact, irregular fabric of Guangling Old Town, where timber compounds and later brick-and-concrete buildings coexist. Rather than consolidating parcels, the design preserves the original plot boundaries and alley alignments, utilizing small infill and targeted renovation to maintain the cadence of narrow passages, forecourts, and layered thresholds. This approach maintains the characteristic balance between void and solid and supports the incremental rhythms that have historically governed the district’s urban life.
The program is distributed as a procession of gardens, courts, and covered corridors that modulate privacy from street to room. The lobby inhabits the repurposed cinema hall as a public forecourt. Dining and wellness are sited along the edges and around inner patios to maintain through-views and a porous microclimate. The plan uses interstitial spaces as climatic buffers, extending traditional courtyard logics into contemporary hospitality operations without resorting to scenography.
Structural strategies align with the site’s strata. The timber heritage hall is preserved and stabilized with minimal insertion. Mid-century brick and concrete blocks are retained, their envelopes refined yet kept legible. New volumes use restrained reinforced-concrete frames sized to the neighborhood’s scale, with spans and cantilevers calibrated to protect sightlines and courtyards. The result is a composite fabric that reads as a continuum rather than a collage.
Cinema-to-Lobby: Adaptive Reuse and Memory
The former Subei Cinema becomes the hotel’s primary civic interior. Its timber roof trusses and full hall volume are kept intact, allowing the lobby to occupy the existing grand section without mezzanines or intrusive partitioning. A reinstated screen acknowledges the hall’s typology, so the repurposed space remains intelligible as a cinema even as its use shifts to reception and gathering.
Garden-derived elements reframe the hall as a contemporary pavilion. A central tree pond, an axial corridor, and filtered thresholds temper the transition from street to interior while bringing daylight and planting into the depth of the plan. These devices blur the distinction between inside and outside, replacing linear audience seating with slower, perambulatory movement, thereby extending the experience of Yangzhou’s courtyard gardens into a single-room civic space.
A tactile material palette reinforces continuity with local craft without resorting to pastiche. Aged elm, natural stone flooring, serrated wood veneers, terrazzo, and carefully detailed metalwork are deployed at a scale that invites touch. Collaborations with local artists yield woodcarving prints that reference the cinema’s past programming, embedding cultural memory as layered surfaces rather than literal replicas.
New Additions as Garden Architecture
The two new buildings interpret pavilion, terrace, and corridor archetypes within the compact urban grain. Stepped massing and targeted cantilevers protect courtyard sightlines and create elevated platforms for outlook without increasing overall building height. Circulation threads along covered walks, producing shaded connectors that operate as climatic mediators and social intervals.
At the street edge, a ground floor of recycled grey brick houses private dining rooms, aligning its texture with surrounding courtyard walls. Above, cantilevered guestrooms sit on a simple platform and adopt sloped roofs. Bamboo-mold concrete lends the roof and wall planes a fibrous imprint that resonates with nearby timber and masonry, establishing a dialogue of textures rather than stylistic mimicry. The composition reads as a contemporary tower-like volume that respects the scale of adjacent eaves while opening views back to the alleys.
The sauna volume is organized as an introverted plan around a private court. A semi-transparent brick screen separates entry from the public courtyard, offering privacy while maintaining airflow and dappled light. Staggered double-pitch roofs shift and overlap to bring daylight deep into the plan and to express a layered roofscape consistent with the site. Operable façades featuring folding doors and sliding windows enable seasonal permeability, while hand-chiseled stone tiles and textured stone surfaces reference regional craft traditions through durable, weather-resistant materials suited to high-humidity environments.
Room Typologies, Facades, and Material Cohesion
Guestrooms within the timber heritage fabric preserve the primary structure and external envelope, integrating contemporary services as reversible layers behind panels and within floor build-ups. Open, minimal layouts emphasize roof tectonics, window bays, and framed views to courtyards, allowing the inherited structure to remain the protagonist rather than a backdrop to heavy fit-outs.
Renovated brick and concrete blocks retain their existing openings and overall façade proportions. Added metal grilles, planters, and vertical greenery thicken the corridor edge to mediate privacy and temper the microclimate through shading and evapotranspiration. These elements work in conjunction with operable windows to enhance cross-ventilation, thereby reducing reliance on mechanical conditioning during the shoulder seasons.
A coherent system of materials bridges the old and the new: wood, natural stone, handmade brick, textured plaster, laminated glass, and distressed metal recur across programs, with variations in finish and jointing. Recycled components, including grey bricks at ground level and reclaimed timber where feasible, are combined with details designed for reversibility to support future adaptation. The result is a measured palette that privileges touch, daylight, and thermal mass, aligning constructional choices with the city’s climatic and cultural context.
About B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio
B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio is a design practice based in Beijing, China, founded in 2014. The studio emphasizes blending contemporary architectural language with local cultural and historical contexts to create spaces that resonate both physically and emotionally. Their work often engages adaptive reuse, minimal interventions, and tactile materials to integrate tradition with modernity through spatial storytelling.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architects: B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio
- Interior Design: B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio
- B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio Team: Shuhei Aoyama, Yoko Fujii, Lingzi Liu, Suyun Li, Ziwei Zhou, Jingyuan Li, Xinrui Zhao, Jiahui Wang, Jingyu Yan
- Landscape Designers: Youxiang Lab
- Cinema Exhibition Design: Zhudaoruwen Studio
- Other Contributors: Zhudaoruwen Studio (Cinema Exhibition Design)
- Client: Guangling Culture&Tourism Group
- Construction Company: Yangjian Group; Yangzhou Yijiangxuan Garden Ancient Architecture Construction Co., Ltd.
- Brand Operation: Vanke Hotels & Resorts
- Construction: Yangjian Group; Yangzhou Yijiangxuan Garden Ancient Architecture Construction Co., Ltd. (Renovation of Cultural Heritage Buildings)
