Shenyang Vanke Hongmei Creative Park

瀋陽万科・紅梅文創園

The Hongmei Creative Park, is a project that entailed the development of decades old industrial site into a cultural and creative park for the city of Shenyang in China. This was done through an intricate work of preservation, restoration, and conversion of a series of industrial buildings into art galleries, museums, art markets, innovations hubs, libraries, and incubators to serve as the nucleus of the Creative Park, and Shenyang city, as a whole. The Project, at masterplan level, included also the development of new building extensions and annexes in strategic locations to support the historical buildings, and enhance the Park complex, and its connectivity to the city.

One of the first factories that started was the Manchuria Agricultural Chemical Industry, opened by Japanese businessmen in 1939, which then, after the war was taken over by several Chinese companies that continued to add buildings to the complex, the last one of which was the Hongmei Group. The Group was the leading enterprise of domestic MSG production, and the first well-known Chinese trademark to grow out of Shenyang, before it was declared bankrupt in 2014.

The end result was a site comprised of buildings from various periods, a reflection of Shenyang’s proud industrial heritage, a witness to the city’s key historical moments, and an embodiment of its collective memory. Architecturally speaking, the buildings of the complex are representative of the transition from wood structure to framed concrete one, presenting a rich depiction of construction practices in the past millennium.