Qiantang Bay Cultural District

The Qiantang Bay Cultural District transforms a former industrial stretch of the Zhedong Canal in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan district into a green cultural corridor of terraces, gardens and performance spaces anchoring the Qiantang Bay Future Headquarters Base in Qianjiang Century City. Zaha Hadid Architects designed the district's civic buildings for client Hangzhou Xiaoshan Qianjiang Century City Development and Construction: an 18,000-square-metre library organised around inhabitable structural columns and clad in jade-toned masonry tiles that echo the region's five-thousand-year stone-craft heritage, and a 17,000-square-metre International Youth Exchange Centre of carved, interlinked auditoriums and studios, set alongside a museum, plazas and parkland. Integral to Hangzhou's sponge-city strategy, the Central Water Axis threads permeable surfaces, planted swales and water-retention landscape through the site, knitting the canal basin back into the city as both a public realm and a flood-resilient ecological spine.