A pastel-pink church hall has been added to the 1930s-built Huaxiang Church in Fuzhou, southeastern China, featuring rooftop amphitheatres that offer open-air services.

Architecture studio Inuce, which has offices in China and Switzerland, designed the church hall and community centre to accommodate the growing number of Christians in the local area, who no longer fitted inside the 80-year-old church.

The new building contains a large hall with a capacity of 1,500, along with two multifunctional spaces that can each hold around 500 people.

The rest of the building contains music rehearsal rooms for the choir, offices, classrooms for the Sunday school and general activity rooms.

When the original church was built, its steeple was clearly visible above the surrounding single-storey houses. But now it is surrounded by office and housing blocks.

Along with the meeting the functional need of creating a larger space for worship and community events, the building has been designed reestablish the church's place in its urban environment.

"The new community centre was conceived to embody a change in the congregation's self-perception and to communicate it to the urban audience," Dirk U Moench, principal of Inuce, told Dezeen.

"Starting out as an oppressed minority, with only few old people hiding in the seclusion of a backstreet, over the past 20 years the Huaxiang congregation has developed into a dynamic community with mostly young believers."

(Source: Dezeen)