Huilongguan: A 63,000 m² Sports and Cultural Centre

Huilongguan is one of Beijing's largest residential areas: over 400,000 people in a dense suburban grid of apartment towers built in the early 2000s. For two decades, it had almost no public cultural or sports facilities. The Huilongguan Sports and Cultural Center, designed by DAQI Architects and completed in 2023, fills that gap with a 63,000 square metre complex containing a sports centre, a cultural arts centre, an outdoor stadium, and a public park. It is one of the largest community infrastructure projects built in Beijing in recent years.

The project was part of Beijing's Huitian Action Plan, a municipal programme to retrofit underserved suburban neighbourhoods with the public amenities they were built without. The architecture had to be civic, legible, and open. It also had to fit into a tight site between apartment blocks, a highway, and an existing park.

Two Buildings, One Campus

The complex is split into two main buildings: the sports and fitness centre (approximately 38,000 m²) and the cultural activity centre (approximately 25,000 m²). Between them, a public plaza, landscaped slopes, and an outdoor running track connect the complex to the adjacent park. The two buildings read as related but distinct: the sports centre is horizontal and heavy, the cultural centre is taller and more sculptural.

The campus logic matters because this is not a single building viewed from one angle. It is a piece of urban infrastructure that must be approached from many directions and used by many different groups simultaneously.

The Sports Centre: 11 Facilities Under One Roof

The sports centre contains badminton courts, a basketball arena, a 50-metre swimming pool, a skating rink, table tennis, martial arts, climbing walls, and an aerobics hall. The building is organised around a central atrium with a cylindrical timber-clad column containing escalators. The facade uses horizontal timber cladding with an oval window on one face and a series of arched openings at ground level that connect the interior to the outdoor track.

The swimming pool is a clear-span space under exposed steel trusses with blue walls. The basketball court has a yellow mural wall with Chinese calligraphy. Each sport facility has its own colour and spatial identity, which helps with wayfinding in a building this large.

The Cultural Centre: Theater, Library, Studios

The cultural centre is the more architecturally expressive of the two buildings. Its facade is a composition of white concrete panels with circular windows, concentric-circle relief sculptures, arched openings, and brick-clad base volumes. Inside, a full-height glazed cylinder contains a tree-column structure and serves as the main lobby. A grand theater, a multi-functional theater, a library, rehearsal rooms, art studios, a children's activity area, and a Quyi (traditional performance) studio are distributed across four floors.

Facade Language: Circles, Arches, and Concrete Relief

The facade is the most distinctive element of the project. The concentric-circle reliefs are cast into the concrete panels and read as oversized targets or ripples. The circular windows punch through the wall at different scales. The arched openings at ground level create covered walkways and frame views to the running track and park. The brick cladding at the base anchors the white volumes to the ground.

This is a building designed to be recognisable. In a neighbourhood of identical apartment towers, a civic building needs a face. The circles and arches give it one without resorting to spectacle.

The Outdoor Stadium and Public Space

The outdoor running track and stadium sit between the two buildings. The grandstand is a steel-truss structure with yellow V-columns, open to the air. The rooftop of the sports centre is developed as a public terrace with sculpted concrete forms, ramps, and planted areas. Multi-level outdoor corridors and platform squares connect the buildings to the park and the neighbourhood.

Drawings

The plans show the scale and complexity of the programme. The sports centre's underground floor contains the skating rink and pools. The upper floors stack basketball, badminton, and swimming in a compact section. The cultural centre plan shows the grand theater, the lobby cylinder, and the rehearsal and studio rooms wrapping around it.

Why This Project Matters

Public sports and cultural facilities in Chinese suburban neighbourhoods are a building type that barely existed ten years ago. Most of these areas were built as pure housing with no civic programme. Projects like Huilongguan represent a correction: the city building the infrastructure it forgot to include the first time. The architecture has to be generous, legible, and durable enough to serve hundreds of thousands of people for decades.

If you are interested in large-scale civic architecture, sports facility design, or urban retrofitting in high-density residential areas, this project is worth studying for how it organises a complex programme into a legible campus, and how its facade language creates identity in a neighbourhood that has none.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If you are working on public architecture, sports facilities, or community cultural centres, uni.xyz is a place to publish your work and connect with a global design community.

Project credits: Huilongguan Sports and Cultural Center by DAQI Architects. Beijing, China. 63,000 m². Completed 2023. Photographs: Ji Li.