On April 16, the winners of the 2025 MUSE Design Awards were announced. “Sifang Optoelectronic Jiashan Industrial Park”, a design project led by young faculty member Xie Mengjun from the School of Fine Arts, stood out from more than 3,000 entries from 38 countries worldwide to win the MUSE Design Award Gold Winner in the Industrial Architecture category. This marks another significant international recognition following the project’s First Prize in the 2024 Hubei Provincial Survey and Design Achievement Awards.

Certificate of Awards. Provided by Xie Mengju

The project embraces the design concept of “Dynamic Optoelectronics, Green and Low-Carbon”. Its overall planning arranges nine buildings in a “nine-square grid” layout, with courtyards and leisure spaces interspersed between the structures. The buildings are interconnected through covered walkways, accommodating a rich mix of functions including production, office, research and development, living, and recreational spaces. For the architectural façade design, the team extracted patterns from optoelectronic sensors and transformed them into architectural vocabulary, blending futuristic technology with natural flowing lines to achieve unity between architectural image and technological cultural metaphors. In terms of low-carbon performance, the project employed intelligent low-carbon building generation and optimization technology during the early design phase, coordinating multi-scale elements of planning layout, architectural space, and façade skin to achieve harmony between low-carbon performance and architectural form design.

Bird’s-eye view of the completed project. Photo provided by Xie Mengju

The MUSE Design Awards, established by the International Awards Association (IAA) in the United States, is one of the most influential and authoritative awards in the international design field, dedicated to recognizing outstanding achievements in global creativity and design. This year’s jury consisted of 110 top experts from 38 countries, including many industry leaders and representatives from renowned institutions, making the competition exceptionally fierce. That this work could win a Gold Award in such a high-caliber competition fully demonstrates the innovation and international standard of its design concept. Xie Mengju has deeply engaged in sustainable architectural design, committed to the innovative integration of ecological technology and humanistic values, and actively explores green development paths for regional architecture.