Oat Flour Production Plant in Ningwu, China by JSPA Design

Project: Oat Flour Production Plant
Architects: JSPA Design
Location: Ningwu, Shanxi Province, China
Area: 256,181 sq ft (site), 94,722 sq ft (factory production area), 6,458 sq ft (dormitory), 80,729 sq ft (indoor spaces)
Year: 2019
Photos by: Schran Images

Oat Flour Production Plant by JSPA Design

Located in Ningwu, Shanxi Province, the project involved creating an oat flour production plant that transforms raw oats into flour products. The mostly automated production process required two distinct production lines with high-performance equipment and public-facing spaces including a store, café, and offices.

The surrounding environment offered very low quality with recently built industrial buildings, dry landscape and coal mines. It was interesting to develop the plant as an introverted building that recreates its own natural environment. Beyond meeting all functional requirements, we considered the project as a building that stimulates human senses and offers an unexpected experience to visitors.

The idea was to use a system of brick walls to enclose and hide various technical plant rooms on the opaque first floor, and install a simple concrete volume at the top to house all public program spaces. Patios and large gardens pierce through the entire building, providing natural lighting and creating impressive spatial expansions within the plant. Central production areas also receive natural light from concrete canopies that open up the roof to northern daylight.

The brick wall system starts from the front of the plant where an open landscape space is intentionally left for local community use with benches and water features for children's play. The brick walls gradually grow from the shape of benches to become the plant’s enclosure, then form the building's façade.

The form taken by the brick walls will shape and define various plant entrances, each with a specific function: raw material delivery, product loading, staff entry and visitor access. Separated into distinct paths, staff and visitors will never intersect inside the plant while employees enjoy a functional organization, and visitors pass through a planned spatial experience. At one point only the production line is shown to visitors in an elevated corridor looking into the workshop.

The staff dormitory was placed at the back of the plant and created as an invisible architecture. The brick enclosing wall was extended to accommodate the building, and patios were created for lighting rooms while maintaining their intimacy. The space between plant and dormitory becomes a garden with a concrete table and square benches.

The choice of building materials is crucial: the use of grey brick creates a strong connection to the place by using local construction methods. Exposed concrete, on the other hand, highlights the modernity of the building and allows structure and architecture to be unified.

Landscape design is fully integrated into the process, with rainwater collected on the roof redirected to water features at different levels through monolithic concrete drainage channels, making natural rainwater movement part of the spatial perception. Water flows to the plant entrance where a final waterfall, combined with a twelve-meter cantilevered concrete wall logo, invites visitors to enter the architecture.

As part of the design process, some regulatory issues were resolved through design. Fire safety required a water container on the roof which we decided to design as an independent element—a cantilevered steel container like a sculpture on the roof.

- Project description and images provided by Current-Newswire