WEI+ Design Turns Jingdezhen's Kiln District into Zhuozhuo Community

By Elena Vasquez

WEI+ Design has completed Zhuozhuo Community, a 9,532-square-metre urban regeneration project set for 2026 in Jingdezhen's Taoyangli Historic District. The scheme converts former workshops, residences, guild halls and narrow alleyways into an open, multifunctional cultural community.

Shi Jianwei led the project as lead architect. Wei Wei shot the photographs, and Minimaist supplied the vases used throughout the interiors.

What does the project actually change?

The site sits between two anchors of Jingdezhen's ceramic history. On one side is Zhongshan North Road, a historic commercial street that dates back roughly 600 years. On the other is the Imperial Kiln archaeological site. Taoyangli holds the layered urban fabric between the two — a dense environment built up over centuries of porcelain production, commerce and everyday life.

The architects' approach is notably anti-monument. Rather than preserving individual buildings as isolated objects, the project, in the architects' words, "explores how historic urban spaces can accommodate contemporary functions while retaining their architectural identity and cultural continuity."

That's a working distinction, and it matters. Instead of freezing facades, WEI+ Design treats the district's collection of existing buildings, residential structures and traditional alleyways as one connected system. The outcome is an open cultural community, not a museum street.

Why Jingdezhen, and why here?

Jingdezhen produced imperial porcelain for centuries, and Taoyangli is where that industry physically settled: kilns, workshops, guild halls and worker housing packed into narrow lanes. The fabric survived, but its original uses did not. Regeneration here means finding new programs for buildings whose economic logic disappeared — a common problem in China's former industrial and craft districts.

Zhuozhuo Community's answer is multiplicity. A former workshop can host culture; a guild hall can serve a public role; the alleys stay as circulation rather than becoming decorative backdrop.

What does 9,532 square metres buy?

At 9,532 square metres, the project covers roughly the footprint of a mid-size cultural campus — enough to knit multiple buildings and the lanes between them into one usable whole. The scale signals that this is district-level intervention, not a single-building restoration.

The project's real test will be whether contemporary functions can coexist with the alleyway fabric without turning it into set dressing. The architects' stated goal — cultural continuity through active use rather than isolation — is the standard against which the completed community should be judged.