Text description provided by the architects. It's a building renovation project. In an old traditional neighborhood, the building has been transformed from offices and a hotel into an artistic and cultural complex, opening up to the city with a simple and distinctive personality, reuniting the natural landscape of the lake and the lakeside historical and cultural district, activating and bringing new vitality to this historic city.
The building is a reinforced concrete frame structure, and the floor slab adopted a prestressing system. Low floor heights and the lack of connection among floors shackle the openness and freedom that art spaces should have. From the inside out, we reorganized the building's function, creating freedom and proper variation of the interior space, thus affecting the facade and connecting with the open view of DaMing Lake.
We separate some relatively independent and closed functions to form multiple independent "boxes", which are freely stacked, staggered, and squeezed within the framework of the six-storey space, blanking the homogeneous structural columns, and breaking the horizontal limitation of the floors.
The blank-leaving among the "boxes" become open functions, creating a column-free public space that crosses the floor, flows freely, and grows vertically where the upper and lower floors connect. The corridor of horizontal traffic function is also integrated into the public space and interconnected. The original structural frame and floor panels were visually liberated.
To make these stacked "boxes" a whole, we wrapped the surface of the building with aluminum sheets. Echoing the interior space, punched aluminum plates with different permeability produce the transparency required, so that the wrapped "boxes" space can be perceived by pedestrians walking on the street. The aluminum plates are folded out of the corrugated shape so that they can generate enough stress on themselves without creating excess structure.
The punched aluminum panels as windows of independent space, and together with the blank-leaving among the "boxes", are superimposed on the facade, forming staggered layer imprints of different sizes. At the same time, the public part has become more open.
At night, interior lighting shines through surface holes and openings, rendering the entire building warm. Due to the staggering and continuity, the internal become both independent and mixed, forming a three-dimensional, abundant, open, and free art life experience center.
