City for Humanity Awards 2025 was held at West Village in Chengdu. YIIIE Architects was invited by City for Humanity Awards and Didi Enterprise Edition to design the site and installations for Chengdu Rambles. During the event, the venue was open not only to invited guests and co-creating institutions, but also to the general public, presenting a “theatre of stories” shaped by collective wandering and shared perception. Within the central court of West Village, we reorganized and redesigned the site’s various “infrastructures.” Through the design, we sought to collectively redefine boundaries through dynamic structures and blurred edges—between the individual and the city, culture and scene.

Entering from the foyer at the main entrance, a slender truss structure constructs a space that sits between architecture and landscape. From this threshold, the space unfolds in two directions: one side faces the main stage, with seating and a large screen broadcasting event information; the other opens toward the market area. Between these two orientations lies a zone that is both passage and pause—an information hub as well as a shared public living room.

The inner venue is organized by movable communal benches and 17 blue pivoting micro-stages, forming a flexible environment that enables freer collaboration and co-creation among institutions, while linking the outer circular main stage and stepped audience seating into a cohesive story theatre. At different moments throughout the event, the widened benches become adaptable public furniture, usable anytime and anywhere across the site. We imagine this as a boundary that anyone can define—where everyone holds their own interpretation of urban life.

Using commonly employed stage decking and modular framing, we assembled a temporary grandstand capable of accommodating a larger audience. Its sides are wrapped in semi-transparent mesh fabric, revealing layered logics of temporariness. During performances and screenings, the grandstand, together with the adjacent benches, offers diverse and welcoming seating options that encourage people to casually join or leave at will.