This project explores what a community center in industrial parks could be like, with a mix-and-match experiment. The project starts with a program list for community center including various daily life amenities for workers such as cafeteria, street food vendor, barber shop, grocery store, tea house, milk tea vendor, car-wash facility, retail space, computer service center, pharmacy etc. The goal is to create a place that all people working in this manufacturing campus could go to for food, service, and fun after work. We started the design process with an analysis of the form of daily life amenities in the urban context in China. Most storefronts for such amenities embody vernacular design languages and are fully integrated with objects in daily lives. We wonder what is the opposite of this form. Projects with high-modern monumentality attracts our attention. Projects with highly monumental aesthetics are enormous in scale, minimalistic in architectural language, and nothing related to daily life could be attached to it. It attracts people’s attention and plays an essential role in shaping the urban context that we live in. We wonder why not experiment with introducing monumentality into this community center, as a way to rethink the role of workers’ after work life in industrial parks. 

If industrial parks are places that always put work and production at first since the first day they were created, then what is the role of the after-work life and how could it be like? We took monumentality as an approach to challenge the commonly accepted understanding of work-life relationships, and rethink what community centers that house the workers’ after work lives could be.