Songzhuang is like the Santa Fe of China. Since founding in the early 1990s after Yue Minjun and Fang Lijun moved there, the edgy community has grown with the booming Chinese art market, an explosion of activism and commentary that has flourished even with (or because of) the country’s watchful communist party. An answer to the area’s expanding interest among artists, this new 20-unit community apartment by Beijing’s DnA lets creative types live and work with their art and near like-minded others.

The units each have a studio workroom and a small gallery space and the complex hosts communal areas for larger productions or multi-artist showcases. The eye-catching, geometric shapes of the exterior are made from gray concrete blocks with orange highlights that are haphazardly stacked to create small nooks and voids that scatter light and thin the structural volume. [via archdaily, pics by savoye and iwan baan]