MVRDV has just revealed Bihailou Art Village, a cultural and retail complex already under construction in Shatoujiao, in Shenzhen's Yantian District, a short walk from the Hong Kong border.
The building is a pile of houses. Each function inside gets its own volume, its own front door and its own color and material, and those volumes are stacked into an irregular mass that looks less like a building than like a village that was picked up and set down on top of itself.
Inside the stack sits a multifunctional performance theater, double-height with retractable seating so the room converts to an exhibition hall, alongside shops and restaurants. The Fish Lantern Museum occupies one of the volumes, built around the fish lantern traditions of Shatoujiao, which keeps the complex tied to the district it sits in rather than floating free of it.