historic shipyard in china becomes walkable volcanic stone rooftop by kengo kuma
By kat barandy I designboom
On the former Guangzhou Shipyard, a long incline cuts through Kengo Kuma and Associates’ Shipyard 1914, carrying the memory of boats once launched toward the Pearl River. The project sits in a city known for its flat terrain, so the old slipway already felt like a constructed landscape before the architecture arrived.
Kengo Kuma’s intervention keeps that slope in view, then extends it upward through a layered roofscape where people can climb, pause, and look back toward the water.
The newly completed Shipyard 1914 turns the former industrial site into a 4,400-square-meter mixed-use complex for art, retail, cafés, and cultural programming.
Its name points to the shipyard’s founding year, while its form takes shape around the ramp once used to guide ships into the river. The building works with that inherited infrastructure instead of flattening it out, treating the slipway as both circulation and memory.
The team at Kengo Kuma and Associates builds from the slope of the former Guangzhou Shipyard with a series of inclined slabs that rise like a new piece of terrain. Beneath them, halls of different sizes are tucked into the section, giving the complex an interior life shaped by the roof above. A straight axis runs through the glass, keeping the former launch path legible from within the new building. It is a simple move, but a strong one. The shipyard’s past stays visible as a line through space.
The roof becomes the project’s main public gesture. Instead of reading as a cap, it operates as a ground plane lifted into the air, with steps and gentle inclines that invite movement across the building. As visitors climb, the view opens gradually to the Pearl River and the dense city beyond. The architecture turns a piece of industrial infrastructure into a lookout, giving the site a new civic rhythm without erasing the shape that came before.
Shipyard 1914 transforms a former Guangzhou shipyard into a cultural and commercial complex
Material choice gives the project much of its character, as the roof surface is covered in porous reddish-brown volcanic stone, chosen for its granular texture and earthy weight. Against the surrounding high-rises, the stone brings a rougher register to the site. It makes the roof feel closer to landscape than envelope, a surface that can be touched, crossed, and occupied.
Shipyard 1914 fits into a broader conversation about how post-industrial sites can carry their histories forward through use, section, and material. Kuma’s design avoids treating preservation as a frozen condition. Here, the old slipway becomes a path, a roof, and a way of seeing Guangzhou from the river’s edge. The project’s strongest move is also its most direct: it lets the act of launching ships remain present, even as the site shifts toward culture and public life.
Kengo Kuma and Associates preserves the site’s historic slipway as the project’s main gesture
the building rises from an incline once used to launch ships toward the Pearl River
a sloped roof turns the former industrial infrastructure into a walkable public landscape
This article was originally published by Designboom.
