China’s Anji Hood Wins Cultural Space of the Year at Frame Awards

What China’s best new cultural spaces have in common: the light touch

Anji Hood, a cultural project by RoarcRenew Architects, was named Cultural Space of the Year at the Frame Awards 2026.

The award was announced on October 22 at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. The project was chosen from more than 1,000 submissions by 100 jurors across 10 panels.

A cultural space shaped by its setting

Anji Hood sits on a hillside in Anji, in Zhejiang province, where a cluster of umbrella-like canopies steps gently down the slope and follows the rows of tea bushes.

The project has no grand entrance, plinth or monumental block of stone. Its design instead follows the hillside and the existing pattern of the tea plantation.

Eleni Stefania Kalapoda, an ARB-registered architect and urban designer and the founder of Embedded Climates, writes that projects such as Anji Hood reflect a wider change in the way cultural venues are being designed in China.

A shift from icons to institutions

Three of the five projects shortlisted for the “cultural space” award were in mainland China: My Museum Beijing, Anji Hood and the Huishan Ancestral Hall Museum in Wuxi.

The shortlist places these projects within a broader expansion of China’s cultural infrastructure. China had 7,046 registered museums at the end of 2024, and those museums welcomed 1.49 billion visits that year.

That scale changes the central question facing cultural development, according to the source: it is no longer simply how many venues can be built, but what kind of venues should follow.

The emerging answer is a move towards cultural spaces that are quieter, lighter and more deeply rooted than the icons of recent decades. Anji Hood illustrates that approach through its low-key presence, hillside layout and close relationship with the tea bushes around it.

Source: South China Morning Post