Strait Culture and Art Center Clad in LOPO Terracotta panels and louvers Won Architecture Awards

Designed by PES-Architects of Finland, located in Fuzhou, China, the Strait Culture and Art Center won several international architecture awards this year.

Asia Pacific Property Award - The project won the five-star award in the Best Public Service Architecture category at the 2019-20 Asia Pacific Property Awards, and made its way to the next phase of the international finals, competing with other regional winners for the "the Best of the World" title of the International Property Awards. Asia Pacific Property Awards is International Property Awards's regional award for the Asia Pacific region, while IPA is used to recognize and reward the world's most outstanding companies from all sectors of the property and real estate industry.

A Special Mention in the Architizer A+ Awards 2019 - The project received a special mention in the Architizer A+ Awards in the Cultural-Hall / Theater category. Architizer A+ Awards 2019 focus on promoting and celebrating the year's best architecture and products. This year's award-winning pieces have been selected from thousands of works from more than 100 countries around the world.

The project covers an area of around 150,000 square meters and consists of five functional buildings-an opera house, concert hall, multi-functional theater, art exhibition hall and cinema center. It is an "super culture project" that brings together international cutting-edge design and state-of-the-art construction techniques and environmental protection building concept, and the total project cost is about 550 million US dollars.

The design of the Strait Culture and Art Center is inspired by the Jasmine, which is the "City Flower" of Fuzhou. The five functional buildings are like five petals of the jasmine flower. The facade of the buildings are clad with white terracotta panels and terracotta louvers. The whole project resembles a beautiful white jasmine flower. The terracotta louvers not only functions as the shading for the building, meanwhile, they were designed and installed on the curved facade, yielding an ever-changing light and shadow effect, and making the building itself a piece of art work that are capable of improvisation at any time. The ultimate expression of the two Chinese elements "terracotta" and "China White" has created an "Oriental Sydney Opera House" with distinct Chinese characteristics.

LOPO China is proud to be the supplier of terracotta cladding for this project. During a period of three years after the project's kick-off, we worked closely with the architects and constructors, to update and optimize the design and manufacturing technique of cladding materials continuously. LOPO customized the production of fine-grained, glazed terracotta panels and glazed terracotta louvers up to 1800 mm, carried out various post-processing and cutting in the factory according to the requirements of complex curved surfaces of the building and successfully completed the task of providing bulk supply for the project under intense construction schedule.

LOPO China takes pride in Strait Culture and Art Center's winning of the international architecture award. It is also our hope that we can cooperate with more domestic and foreign architects in the future to apply the high-quality terracotta cladding product with a long history into more world-class construction projects.

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