Xiangyang is a renowned historical and cultural city in China — the birthplace of Chu culture, Han culture and the culture of the Three Kingdoms period. It also serves as a provincial sub-central city of Hubei, a central city of the Han River Basin, and a member of the middle-reaches city cluster of the Yangtze River. Amid the evolution of the times and the city, Xiangyang is radiating ever more pronounced vitality, with a new wave of consumer demand ready to surge.

When PHA received the invitation to the design competition for the Xiangyang Wushang MALL project, the team hoped to respond to the city's development stage and the shift in residents' lifestyles with a more forward-looking spatial vision — building for Xiangyang a composite commercial carrier oriented toward a new era, one that accommodates people's expectations for high-quality public life and diverse consumption experiences.

Through an analysis of the project's location and the surrounding commercial landscape, the design team raised a core question: How, in a city like Xiangyang — one with deep historical roots and a relatively stable pace of life — can one create a lifestyle-oriented commercial space that is truly integrated into daily life?

Conventional department stores suffer from severe homogenization in their internal formats and spaces, remain disconnected from public space, and offer a single-dimensional functional experience. Such a model can no longer satisfy the "self-pleasing" and "experience-driven" consumption demands of today's younger clientele in particular. Taking a new-generation "LIFE MALL" model as its direction, PHA integrates commerce with such themes as ecology, art, experience and social culture, elevating the mall's emotional experience.

Under the theme of "Encountering Wushang in Xiangyang," the design reimagines a shopping experience as a chance urban encounter along the banks of the Han River. The spatial narrative unfolds layer by layer around water, ecology, culture and contemporary life, making a trip to the mall a perceivable, stay-worthy urban journey.

The facade design takes the Xiangyang Ancient City as its concept, reconstructing the commercial memory of the ancient city through modern craftsmanship. Drawing on the local Yuliang Island culture, the design takes the dense-and-sparse woven lines of Yuliang culture as its inspiration, creating aluminum-panel forms of varied texture that enhance the project's sense of local cultural value.

The facade serves both a city-showcase function and, at the pedestrian scale, establishes a perceivable cultural connection, making the building a memorable presence within the city's interface.