The Yabuli Entrepreneurs' Congress Center was designed to provide a permanent venue for annual wintertime summits held by the China Entrepreneurs Forum, a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 by leading Chinese business executives. Every year around the Lunar New Year, CEF members gather in Yabuli, a popular ski resort in northeastern China, to exchange ideas and promote the spirit and vision of China's private-sector entrepreneurs. The Yabuli resort is in Heilongjiang province, renowned for an annual snow sculpting festival. It is a contest in which the expansive, silvery white form of the conference center roof would seem to fit right in. Only instead of snow and ice, the structure's roof features a contoured array of aluminum panels. Located at the foot of a 1,000 m tall mountain, the conference center's tentlike structure is defined by soft, sloping lines. Casually mirroring its backdrop, the structure settles quietly into the landscape, integrating its presence with the sky, the ground, the snow, the forest, and the mountain. Facing a ski run on its west side, the structure meets the slope of the mountain trail and extends out, the tip of the roof gently lifting as if escaping gravity. The rest of the roof seems to float down onto the snowfields and fade into the ground.
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