PRA's 23,433 m² Chun'an Distillery Rises Near Qiandao Lake for 2026

Project for Research and Architecture (PRA) has designed a 23,433 m² distillery in Chun'an, slated for 2026, on the edge of Qiandao Lake — a nationally protected freshwater reservoir in eastern China's Zhejiang province. Fangfang Tian photographed the project. Resysta, a manufacturer, supplied materials for the build.

The commission lands in a region dense with architectural history. Throughout Zhejiang and around Qiandao Lake, ancient cities carry heritage detail and quintessential Hui-style architecture. PRA's architects describe the setting's character precisely. The style, they write, "is revered for its white walls, dark swooping eaves and dense winding corridors."

That vocabulary frames the design brief. Hui-style architecture (the classical building tradition of the region, marked by whitewashed walls and sweeping dark-tiled roofs) gives the distillery its formal references rather than imported industrial typologies. This is a production facility asked to speak a heritage language at reservoir scale.

What drives the design philosophy?

PRA's text is unusually explicit about the ideas behind the massing. "This graceful disorder is at once graphically potent yet restrained," the architects write. The firm treats the region's traditional fabric not as decoration to quote but as a compositional logic to extend.

Central to that logic is a contrast the architects call philosophical. "Chinese architecture in this style reinforces the philosophical emptiness of white and the solidity of black," they state. In other words, the white wall is not a background. It carries meaning of its own.

The practice pushes the point further: "The expression of emptiness is as important as to what is filled." Void, in this reading, is a designed material on par with built mass — an inversion of the typical industrial program, where volume and throughput usually dictate form.

That inversion shapes how the complex is meant to move. "Void space meanders through places of activity, creating a macro sensation of slowness that obscures an inner vibrancy," the architects write. The distillery's circulation is conceived as a sequence of pauses, with the gaps between buildings doing real spatial work.

What does this change for industrial architecture in protected landscapes?

It tests whether large-footprint production buildings can adopt regional grammar without costume. At 23,433 m², the distillery is far bigger than any Hui-style courtyard house it draws from. PRA's bet is that scale and slowness can coexist — that a visitor reads calm surfaces first and discovers the facility's intensity only by moving through it.

The project also signals how Resysta's material systems (a wood-alternative composite suited to humid climates) perform in a heritage-toned palette near protected water. That data point lands when the 2026 completion arrives, alongside Tian's fuller photographic record of the finished complex.