China’s rural mass timber push has produced a 26-metre clear-span glulam workshop in Haotang Village, with 12 curved glued-laminated timber beams spanning an open production hall, returned to local carpenter Zhang on the same patch of ground his original village shed once occupied. The 405-square-metre Carpenter’s Home, completed by Shanghai-based studio Primary Architects under the village’s Eight Traditional Crafts Revival Program, replaces an aging woodworking shed at the rural settlement’s entrance with a digitally fabricated hybrid glulam-and-steel hall designed for woodworking, school workshops and community tea gatherings beneath a single sweeping roof in Pingqiao District.
The 12 curved glulam beams step down gradually from east to west across the workshop floor, with each member running to steel connection nodes in a hybrid system carrying the full 26-metre span without an intermediate column. The double-curved geometry was digitally modelled and parametrically controlled before being prefabricated off-site and assembled through a modular construction process at the village edge, with curved skylights cutting the timber shell in narrow ribbons that follow the curvature of the glulam.
Chief architects Xiang Huang and Songyan Mao approached the roof as an extension of the surrounding mountain, with the curving roofline tracking what the practice calls a dialogue of “disconnected form yet connected spirit” with the distant hills. Skylight openings were sized through sunlight simulations so the workshop operates primarily on natural light through the day, with operable polycarbonate facade panels carrying ventilation across the building envelope and the filtered light spreading evenly across the timber surfaces of the open-plan learning hall.
The open-plan hall accommodates research workshops and educational activities for up to two school classes at once, with flexible woodworking tables supporting traditional mortise-and-tenon teaching alongside contemporary timber experiments. Displays of hand planes, ink markers and timber sections line the walls, placing vernacular tools alongside engineered wood technologies as the workshop reopens the trade Zhang had practised at the original village shed.
The ground floor preserves a dedicated woodworking production area at one end of the hall, with the other section opening toward villagers and visitors through exhibitions, workshops and educational programmes. Upstairs, a tea room serves as a public gathering space and a waiting lounge for parents during school activities, with labour, teaching, hospitality and community interaction deliberately overlapping under one roof.
It comes as Wood Central reported on Canadian glulam gaining ground in China, with more than 20 Chinese glulam producers now operating across the country and Hem-Fir and Yellow Cedar laminations entering small-batch production in 2025. “The pathway is real, and the next step is repeatability,” Lance Tao, Export Development Program Manager for Canada Wood Group, said of Chinese glulam adoption, with the Haotang Village project sitting on the demand end of the same supply chain now scaling across Chinese civic and educational construction.
The Pingqiao District workshop joins a widening Chinese mass timber portfolio anchored by the Jiangsu Provincial Rehabilitation Hospital — China’s first large-scale wood-concrete composite building, delivered under a glulam certification programme established between the Canadian Wood Group’s Chinese office and the China Academy of Building Research. The Haotang Village hall sits on the smaller civic end of the same supply pipeline, with the 26-metre clear span and double-curved roof geometry showing how Chinese glulam manufacturing is feeding programmes well beyond the hospital and high-rise tier.
The 405-square-metre workshop was delivered for client Xinyang Pingqiao District Juxing Agricultural Investment and Development Co., Ltd. by Shanxi Junchen Construction Co., Ltd., with wood structure detailed design by Bowen Li — and carpenter Zhang now back at his bench on the same patch of ground his original village shed once occupied at the entrance of Haotang Village.
