Atelier Diving Bell Stitches a Hangzhou Food Court Together with a Louvered Steel Canopy

Most food court renovations stop at the shopfront: new signage, new lighting, a fresh tenant mix. Atelier Diving Bell took a different brief at Birland, the open-air cultural block at the heart of Liangzhu Culture Village in Hangzhou. Working with Hangzhou Shuxing Architectural Design Co., Ltd., the studio treated the 1,400 m² of paving, eaves and gaps between low shops as the real project. The shops themselves are almost incidental.

What makes this worth your attention is its scale of ambition, which is deliberately modest. Birland serves residents' daily routines and also draws weekend visitors, so the outdoor space has to work for a stroller run on a Tuesday and a crowd on a Saturday. The response is a kit of parts: a lightweight louvered canopy, circular tree benches, a few playful objects. The project calls this "scene stitching," and the phrase is accurate. Nothing here is monumental. Everything is placed so that one moment leads into the next.

A Canopy That Stitches the Shopfronts

The canopy does the main work. It runs in front of the retail units as a slatted roof on green steel frames, and it gives a row of separate storefronts one continuous edge. In the arcade views, diners and shoppers sit in a zone that is neither inside nor fully outside. That in-between band is where a food court earns its keep.

Seen from the plaza, the roofline breaks into a series of gables and sawtooth profiles rather than one flat lid. This keeps the canopy at the scale of the shops beneath it, so it reads as a sequence of small roofs and not a mall awning. The fabric awnings, with their green trim, layer a softer, more domestic element under the steel.

Reading the Roof from Below

The best views of this project look straight up. Timber louvers sit on dark steel beams, and white panels are held by green brackets on grey columns. Each material has its own color, so you can read how the structure is assembled just by looking at it. The louvers filter rather than block the sun, which matters in Hangzhou's humid summers, when full shade under a solid roof can feel heavy and airless.

The credits list two membrane specialists, Shenzhen Zhongheng Membrane Structure Design Institute and S.Cene Studio. That tells you the canopy is engineered more seriously than it looks. The lightness is the point, and it is earned through detailing, not achieved by default.

Trees as Furniture

Out on the open plaza, the designers turned planting into seating. Circular concrete planters with green steel rims carry curved benches, and each young tree becomes a small room with its own shade. It is an old device, but it is used with discipline here: the rings repeat at a steady rhythm, and they leave clear paths for walkers and children cutting across the paving.

The bet is on time. The trees are young now, and the dappled shade in these images is a preview. In ten years the planters will matter less as objects and more as anchors for a canopy of leaves that does what the steel roof does next door.

Scenes, Not Spaces

The black-and-white sequence shows the plan logic best. Picnic tables, canopy frames and shade trees are arranged so that each view down the street gives you a different combination of the same few elements. This is the stitching in practice: no single hero space, but a chain of framed moments between the lawn, the plaza and the shopfronts.

The curved concrete benches with integrated green tables work the same way. They give people a reason to stop in the middle of the promenade rather than only at its edges, and that is how a corridor becomes a place.

Small Jokes at Ground Level

Two details show the project's sense of humor. A stone ledge engraved with "Puppy Parking" comes with bone-shaped stools beside a small green table. Overhead, a green weathervane with a bird silhouette turns above the louvered roof. Neither is necessary, and both are the reason someone will take a photo and come back.

We think these gestures are more strategic than they look. A cultural village competes for attention with every other weekend destination near Hangzhou. Wit at a small scale costs little, and it builds the kind of affection that a big gesture rarely does.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings confirm what the photographs suggest. The section detail shows canopy connections and drainage, which is the unglamorous problem any outdoor roof has to solve. The axonometric breaks the suspended canopy into its layers and labels an ETFE component, explaining the light, translucent quality of the panels. The sightline study along the retail street is the most revealing sheet: green volume overlays test what a pedestrian sees in front of each shop, so the canopy was designed from eye level up, not from plan view down.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese cities are full of cultural villages and lifestyle blocks built quickly over the past fifteen years. Many now have good bones and dead public space. Birland offers a practical model for what comes next: leave the buildings mostly alone, invest in the ground plane and the edge, and use a light, repeatable system that can be maintained and extended.

It also argues for designing renewal as a set of scenes rather than one image. The canopy, the tree rings and the small props are each unremarkable on their own. Put together with care, they turn a food court into somewhere people want to stay, and that is a harder outcome to design than any facade.

Spatial Renewal and Scene Stitching of Birland Food Court by Atelier Diving Bell, with partner Hangzhou Shuxing Architectural Design Co., Ltd. Location: Liangzhu Culture Village, Hangzhou, China. Area: 1,400 m². Year: 2026. Photography: James Wang.

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