TGR Community Center and Museum

The Three Gorges Dam is one of China’s most ambitious infrastructure undertakings—an engineering feat designed to mitigate devastating floods and generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power. Yet, to create the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR), the water level had to rise by over 40 meters, submerging the ancestral lands and homes of 1.4 million people.



These 1.4 million people are now known as the TGR immigrants.



For the TGR immigrants, the rising waters did more than engulf buildings—it drowned generations of memories, fractured deep-rooted social and clan-based networks, and erased livelihoods built on agriculture. Life, as they knew it, had to be rebuilt from the ground up.



Resettled at higher elevations in the surrounding mountains, the TGR immigrants now live on terrain shaped by the rhythms of the reservoir, where water levels fluctuate throughout the year. In this new and shifting environment, they need a space to reconnect—to their past, to one another, and to the future.



The TGR Immigrants Community Center and Museum is conceived as that space: a cultural pier for the flow of people and goods; a communal living room where bonds are rekindled through social and cultural gatherings; and a symbolic beacon that anchors and celebrates a resilient identity.



Designed as a multi-layered, floating structure, the project adapts to the reservoir’s changing tides. Built using locally sourced materials and traditional Chinese timber construction techniques, the center harmonizes with its natural surroundings and cultural roots. Positioned along the Yangtze River like luminous beads on a thread, each center helps re-stitch the fabric of a displaced people—reconnecting, rebuilding, and refloating their communities.