-
Architects: CLAB
- Area: 1350 m²
- Year: 2023
-
Photographs:Lang Xu, Arch-Exist Photography
-
Lead Architects: XU Lang
Text description provided by the architects. The Nature Education Center of Tangjiahe provides content for young families' natural study tours. Different from the type of school education, this building uses lifestyle and natural perception as the educational medium. Its public space includes a museum exhibition hall, multimedia classroom, natural-themed dining space (natural food education), and 9 guest rooms for study tours.
Life in nature is perhaps the best natural education - A key perceptual cognition forms the background of our design work: our design is to let the building connect with nature, and the building as the design result is to let the user connect with nature. The roof of the building is a gigantic concrete "flagstone" in the shape of a saddle, which responds to the valley and the scouring of water: a huge Riverstone. We hope that this building will be shaped by the space-time power of nature. The architectural form comes from the response to mountains and valleys. The building sank into the mountain and crawled on the riverbed as if it were a relic carved by nature in a long history.
The structure of this building is designed as a continuous bending structure plane, and the stairs are placed in these structures to form a continuous overlapping space landscape. The functional plane and the structural plane correspond to the same logic. The space that users want to perceive is exactly the place without a plane (structure), so the functional space is distinguished from the serving space and the served space.
The structural plane and functional plane of the building correspond to the same logic. The service space is also the structure of the building: a continuous landscape is like the stones growing out of the tundra and overlapping with each other. The structural form of the roof itself has become the most important expression of architecture. It comes from the static form of the structure itself and shapes a formal language beyond typology. This process seems to be the process of water shaping river stones.
The structural scheme comes from the demand for the building space itself. In the structural form, we let the 16-meter long span and 9-meter overhang form their own static balance relationship, and the whole building presents a micro-arch shape in the front public space. The volume of the building extending horizontally to both ends provides lateral thrust resistance for the arch.
The logic of the roof structure is mainly to use a multi-ribbed continuous beam to reduce the distance between beams so that each beam can more smoothly complete the 16-meter-long span. The cantilever part is the same. After the concrete beam completes the cantilever structure independently, the thin steel column controls the overall deflection. The slender steel column stands under the thick concrete multi-ribbed plate, bringing the architectural space poetic expression.
