Office Canopy of Architecture Turns a Standard Hangzhou Market into a Park by the Xixi Wetland

Most Chinese neighborhood wet markets were built to one template: a sealed box, a uniform grid of stalls, a facade of grey brick and curtain glass. In Jiangcun, less than 500 metres from Xixi National Wetland Park in Hangzhou's West Lake District, Office Canopy of Architecture (OCOA) took one of these standardized buildings and reworked it for Westlake Construction Investment Group. The result, Park in Market, covers 4,053 m² across three storeys and was completed in 2025. It is part of the district's ongoing program to upgrade agricultural markets.

The interesting part is not the new cladding. OCOA argued that the market should work as a node of community life, a place you might visit with no shopping list at all. To get there, the studio took on the architecture, interiors, landscape, installations, graphics and lighting as one brief. It moved fresh produce upstairs, gave the valuable street frontage to small community shops, and stitched the building into two pocket parks across the road. The client had already completed a market renovation within the previous two years, so the brief also asked for something that would not simply repeat it.

Removing the Barrier at the Street Edge

Before the renovation, large planters sat in front of the building and kept passers-by at a distance. OCOA cleared that buffer and replaced it with a curved timber soffit that wraps the ground floor and reaches out over the pavement. The underside of a canopy is what you actually experience at eye level, so warm wood is a sensible place to spend the budget. It also reads clearly against the grey cladding box above.

Instead of one central entrance into a single uniform hall, the ground floor uses what the designers call a clustered, miniaturized strategy: small shopfronts spaced along the frontage, each with its own glazing and fabric awning. Benches sit in the tree shade, and corrugated metal frames the entrances. The street edge now reads more like a row of small businesses than the wall of an institution, and that, we think, is the move that makes everything else possible.

A Market That Performs After Dark

OCOA organized the programs by height and by hour under the theme "From Dawn, to Market, to Dusk." Wet markets are busiest early in the morning, and the shops and parks are meant to carry activity into the evening. The rounded corner of the building, edged with a planted roof rim and lit from beneath its soffit, becomes a lantern for the plaza at blue hour.

The planted rim does useful work. It softens the top of what is still a fairly blunt volume, and it gestures toward the wetland down the road without resorting to literal imitation. Seen with a child running across the plaza, the building no longer looks like a utility shed. It looks like the backdrop to a public square, and that shift is the project's main argument.

Fresh Produce, Moved Upstairs

Putting the wet market on the second floor is a bold call. Traders and shoppers usually expect ground-floor access for heavy, perishable goods, and the vertical shift relies on an escalator core and confident wayfinding. In return, the street is freed for smaller and more varied businesses, and the produce hall gets a calmer, more legible interior.

Inside, terrazzo counters run beneath exposed timber beams and green ceiling panels. Over the fish and meat sections, tilted translucent blue canopies on timber brackets filter the strip lighting and give each zone its own ceiling. These are small, inexpensive elements, but they turn a column grid into something closer to a covered street. They also echo the canopy language outside, so the building reads as one idea from the plaza to the counters.

Graphics That Do Real Wayfinding

The graphic system, developed with CLD Studio, pairs bold Chinese characters for vegetables, seafood, poultry and eggs, and fresh meat with mesh and net patterns. The references are the bags, crates and fishing nets you actually find in a market, so the identity draws on what is already there. The pattern cards of wavy lines, lattices and dashes carry the same vocabulary into surfaces and signage.

At the northwest corner, the main sign wall uses louvres with green and pink lettering, set beside a curved timber bench and tall grasses. Signs here are something you can sit next to, not just a logo on a facade, and that fits the park-first ambition of the brief.

Wetland Play in the Pocket Parks

Working with Zhizhi Landscape, OCOA extended the project into the two pocket parks across the road. A shady square at the southwest carries dragon-boat-themed play equipment, which nods to a tradition closely tied to the Xixi waterways. Green tubular benches and a looping seesaw sit on gravel beneath fabric canopies. A corner exhibition, developed with the National Wetland Museum of China, adds a cultural layer to the outdoor program.

Play equipment is easy to dismiss as decoration. Here it does real work: it gives parents a reason to stay after shopping and gives children a reason to ask to come back. A market that people linger in will hold its tenants better than a market they simply pass through.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan shows the logic clearly: stalls scattered as freestanding units rather than packed into a grid, a compact service core, and numbered park areas spilling outward. The upper plan follows the curved perimeter, with rows of counters around the escalator and a strip of small shops along one edge. The counter sections set out terrazzo surfaces and a suspended ceiling at the scale of a person standing at the stall.

The wall section is worth studying. Aluminium panels on steel tubes, an integrated planter box and a drainage channel show how the green roof rim is resolved as a buildable facade element. The pavilion sheet and the two axonometrics confirm that the stall canopies and park furniture were designed as a family of kit parts, which is how a renovation budget stretches this far.

Why This Project Matters

China has thousands of standardized municipal markets that are structurally sound but socially inert. Park in Market offers a repeatable method for them: remove the barriers at the street edge, break up the frontage into small units, move the heavy program upstairs, and treat the surrounding public space as part of the building. None of these moves needs a new structure, and all of them can be adapted to a different neighborhood.

The project also makes the case for an integrated scope. Because one office handled architecture, interiors, landscape, graphics and lighting together, the canopies, counters, benches and signage share a single language. In an ordinary market renovation, those elements would be split among different consultants and lose that coherence. That is the lesson we would take to the next market on the list.

Park in Market by Office Canopy of Architecture (OCOA), Hangzhou, China. Area: 4,053 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Qingshan Wu.

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