The exhibition at the Båt Odes to the Land is an essential strategy for the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone to renew and reuse an idle large-scale commercial complex built in the Zhengzhou Garden Expo Park, which was formerly a supporting facility for the 11th China International Garden Expo in 2017. The goal is to repurpose and activate the existing commercial space through art and design exhibition.

Meanwhile, it’s important to build fun and ritualistic connection between the new exhibition space (repurposed from commercial space) and the public area. Exhibition is temporary, but space activation is a consistent goal. Therefore, it’s vital to link the art exhibition with urban life through active construction interventions. The public area requires functions like catering and reading to support the exhibition event. After an open recruitment campaign, local brands HUGS COFFEE and DOGHOOD settled in the public area of the exhibition venue, as the users of the “coffee house” and the “book house”. This is the background story of the two “paper houses”.
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Innovation:
The two “paper houses” are set on a relatively large platform on the second floor of the venue, and the site is in a trapezoid shape on the plane, narrower at one end and wider on the other side. Corrugated paper has been used to construct the two “houses”. Compared to other building materials, it is more brittle and unstable when subjected to stress. To realize high level of stability, a circular plane becomes the best choice for the two “houses”.

Creativity:
To meet the requirement for efficient and fast construction for the exhibition, the quantity of standardized components are minimized as much as possible. Many components have the identical specifications in the top and bottom ends, as well as front and back sides, which has effectively avoided human errors during installation and allowed for rapid assembly.

Functionality:
With consideration into site restrictions and the need for guiding the circulation, the “coffee house” adopts two separate semicircles on the plane. The drawback of such layout is that the structural mechanics relationship is relatively loose. For this reason, necessary small-section metal components are utilized to reinforce the entire construction, which also connect the diameters of the two semicircles into one integrated straight line.

Sustainability:
The corrugated cardboard used is a paper-based material with a relatively high strength. Based on several rounds of tests in the factory and the previous design practices of Cardboard-formed Exhibition Space 1.0 and 2.0, it has been confirmed that this material can be repeatedly assembled, disassembled and reassembled many times, thus realizing long-term and repeated reuse. It is conceivable that the two “paper houses” can also be dismantled after the exhibition and can achieve sustainable reuse as well like its predecessors.