-
Architects: gad
- Area: 10200 m²
- Year: 2019
-
Photographs:Shiromio Studio, Shouqing Wu
Text description provided by the architects. When living is no longer just living itself, but more related to city functions, life will become more diversified. Qujiangyin community complex, located in Qujiang New District of Xi'an city, runs through the thinking of urban design in its planning and design, breaks through the existing city grid, more completely interprets the breadth and depth of modern life, and blends community life and multiple modern scenes in the city scale from apartments, hotels, business, office to exhibition space. Qujiang Art Center, as the core space at Qujiangyin Block, symbolizes the modern Manifesto of community connecting the city.
Starting Point of Design
How to deal with the relationship between the architecture and the site becomes the starting point of the initial design. The South Third Ring Road adjacent to the site is an urban expressway in Xi'an with heavy traffic. In the face of such a traffic pulse, the architect preset such a scene. The building is like a glass exhibit which is held in the air, forming a unique visual sign beside the urban road. The activities in the exhibition hall also become part of the exhibition, attracting people to enter the site and to feel the narrative of design. Then browsing itself also becomes part of the show.
In fact, the frequent interaction between the exhibition hall and art has already taken place. Not long ago, Qujiang Art Center witnessed the opening and closing of Picasso's silver works exhibition.
Space Narrative
The process of arriving at the site is not a straightforward one, but a process of falling, turning, surprise and suddenly opening up, which seems to coincide with human's emotional experience. The whole building is anchored on the site. The site and the building are integrated with the bottom hidden in the green slope.
Facing the height difference between the site and the 10 meter green belt of the road, how shall people reach the site? The landscape design gives a poetic answer. The gentle slope of the urban green belt is built into a silk belt trail, so that the sense of slope "disappears" in the swing of the trail, leading the walk in. The walk experience becomes a way of dialogue with the site, and also a more close interaction between the site and the city.
The landscape design and space streamline of the drop-off area overlap with each other. The designer is not eager to let people arrive at the exhibition hall, but allows them to go straight through the landscape garden on the first floor. Walking through the landscape area and after taking the 88 second straight ladder, people will see the floating exhibition hall with four transparent walls at the end of the stairs. When looking back from the exhibition hall, the landscape on the roof of the podium and the botanical garden on the east side of the site form a continuous dialogue relationship. The landscape and architectural sequence constitute the designer's narrative of the space, which naturally triggers the emotion and experience at that moment.
Fuzzy boundary
The designer further contemplates the space core by contemplating on the relationship between architecture and nature, the way of interaction and the boundless sense of experience. The Qujiang Art Center glass house, that is, the exhibition hall, adopts double-layer full glass curtain walls to ensure the lightness and transparency of the external facade, allowing the building to interact with the nature in the form of fuzzy boundary. The distance between the two curtain walls is 2m. By controlling the opening and closing of the bottom ventilator and the top opening fan, air convection and closure are formed, so as to realize the environmental protection performance of temperature control, ventilation and sound insulation.
The exhibition hall space is divided into three layers. The whole structure is a suspension structure. Under the suspension structure, the stress mode of the column is changed from bearing pressure to bearing tension, and the performance of the steel is brought into play. The diameter of the suspension column is reduced to 200 mm to achieve the "almost no column" effect in the indoor space. Hence the freedom of the exhibition space can be fully released, and the sight line can be connected with the outside almost unobstructed, blurring the inner and outer boundaries.
Conclusion
Qujiang Art Center is jointly completed by gad, CCD (interior design) and T.R.O.P (landscape design). As a carrier of space and memory, Qujiang Art Center, through the "strength" of design, the "penetration" of materials, and the "cleverness" of structure, skillfully combines the external tension with the modest intervention, and becomes a floating art banquet hall, hoping to inject new topics into Xi'an and Qujiang community.
