Multi-Architecture turned drying fishing nets into a land-art pavilion

Nanhai's mulberry-dike-fish-pond landscape needed a cabana for the art festival; nets are the cheapest, most familiar material in local labor.

Use the region's everyday drying fishing nets as the building: a giant shaded canopy that borrows Xiqiao Mountain as its backdrop.

With structural consultants iStructure, the team calculated maximum volume on a minimal budget and hung fishing nets across the site to the water's edge — 180 sq m of shade, dikes untouched.

The pavilion opened for Art Field Nanhai Guangdong Season 3 in 2026; the nets' scale reads the mountain and water into the site itself.

At the invitation of Art At Qiaoshan – Art Field Nanhai Guangdong 2026, Foshan-based studio Multi-Architecture — lead architect Jin Yuan — built 'Under The Drying Nets', a 180-square-metre pavilion for the festival's 'Fishing and Farming Cabanas 2.0' zone. The site sits in Nanhai's historic mulberry-dike-fish-pond system, where silkworms raised on the dikes fed the fish in the ponds below, and where hanging nets out to dry is part of daily labor.

The commission came with two constraints: a limited budget and pond dikes that could not support heavy construction machinery. Working with structural consultants iStructure, the team chose fishing nets — the cheapest, most familiar tool in the landscape — and calculated the volume to maximize scale, extending the canopy to the water's edge so Xiqiao Mountain and the water become integral parts of the composition. The nets also answered a practical need: shading a former covered-walkway section of the park.

The design references what locals call 'water-shadow winter melons', the melon canopy that once closed over the dikes and gave the paths a room-like enclosure — the nets recreate that interiority with a material already at hand in the fields.

Fishing nets are the lowest-cost material in the local farming system, so scale did not break the budget.

Dikes could not bear machinery, ruling out conventional construction and favoring tension-only material.

The nets double as shade, answering the site's functional need as a walkway section.

Using a working material of the fish-pond economy keeps the pavilion an extension of local labor, not an import.

When budget rules out structure, let the region's own working material do the architecture.

The pavilion opened as part of Art Field Nanhai Guangdong Season 3 in 2026, photographed by Yumeng Zhu and Fangfang Tian, with fabric design by Qi Qi and the Yugengyueyun section's curatorial team.