Wukesong Ice Sports Center, China

The Wukesong Ice Sports Center is the Ice Hockey Training Center for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. It is located at the southeast corner of Wukesong Sports Complex, right close to Changan Street. The project is symmetric with the Basketball Court on the west.

The project consists of two levels above the ground and two levels underground. Functions underground are designed as the ice arena with a capacity of 1900 audiences and related functions surrounding the arena, and other spaces are placed underground for sports culture and a capacity of nine hundred audiences. The Wukesong Ice Sports Center has rewarded three stars of the China Green Building. The building is the biggest stadium with ultra-low consumption of energy in China.

The Sports Center plays an important role in reflecting the commemorative and symbolic significance of the Olympic Games due to its special location and as one of a few newly built stadiums for the event. During the event, the project serves as the Ice Hockey Training Center. After the games, it will become one of the most important Ices & Snow theme sports buildings, which would kindle citizens’ interests across the city to take part in winter sports and therefore we think that designing should create connection by symbols to the world of ice and snow and gather emotional significance and energy into a passion.

The Wukesong Ice Sports Center is like floating ice flowers to aggregate and form the pattern of ice and snow. The design aims to link the figurative sign and abstract architectural structure to be interlaced in perception, which arouses the meaning of symbols in the opaque transparency of an enigma and spark people’s passion for the Winter Olympic Games, and enthusiasm and expectation for winter sports.

The pattern with 45 degrees rotated intersection, grid-wall system, wraps the building and render visual effect like ice cracks and spatial experience with layers. Repeated patterns are to conceal the massing of this block and to view the profile of the building lighter and more implicit. A corridor named the Winter Olympic Games’ Corridor between the grid wall and the main facade becomes a ceremonious and commemorative space. When sunshine penetrates through the pattern, a painting of lights and shadows with the contrast between solid and void is projected to the ground and the facade, which presents the spatial quality of the ice flowers’ sign.

To perceive the rich and vivid symbolic meaning, the number of aluminium patterns was decreased, and colours on elevations highlight the vibrant and enthusiastic atmosphere for the stadium. Lights depict a poetic image of the ice & snow world.