The project designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, hosts since last September the collection of the Art Academy of China. The building, included in Xiangshan campus designed by the architect and Pritzker Prize Wang Shu, is implanted with harmony in a marked topography and gets benefit from it, creating opportunities for exhibition and disclosure fluid spaces, using the ground's contour lines.
For interior and exterior finishes, they used the tiles for old houses' roofs of the area, along with other local materials such as cedar. The small set of roofs covered by tiles give the museum the appearance of a village, making the tea field gradually transformed into the man-made architecture.
Description of the project by Kengo Kuma & Associates
The folk art museum stands in the campus of China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. The site was formerly a tea field that formed a hillside. Our point was to design a museum from which the ground below can be felt, by continuing the building’s floors that follow the ups and downs of the slope. Planning is based on geometric division in the units of parallelogram to deal with the intricate topography. Each unit has a small individual roof, so the outlook became like a village that evokes a view of extending tiled roofs.
The outer wall is covered with a screen of tiles hung up by stainless wires, and it controls the volume of sunlight coming into the rooms inside. Old tiles for both the screen and the roof came from local houses. Their sizes are all different, and that helps the architecture merge into the ground naturally.
CREDITS. DATA SHEET.-
Architect.- Kengo Kuma & Associates.
Structural design.- Konishi Structural Engineers.
Facility design.- PT Morimura & Associates.
Site Area.- 11.279 m².
Location.- Hangzhou,China.
