Chongqing Tiandi Art Museum / Shenzhen Huahui Design - 【Free CAD Download World-Download CAD Drawings】

Architects: Shenzhen Huahui Design Co. Ltd
Location: Yuzhong, Chongqing, China
Architect In Charge: Cheng Xiao
Design Team: Shibo Yin, Qifan He, Weiwei Mao
Structural Designer: Mu Xu, Tingting Zhao
Client: Chongqing Vanke Real Estate Co., Ltd.
Area: 1600.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Zhi Xia, Weiwei Mao

Site
Tiandi Art Gallery is located in the south bank of Jialing River, close to the lake by Tiandi property. There are steep hills in Yuzhong peninsula in the south, Chongqing Tiandi Commercial Street in the north, and residential area under construction in the west.

Mountain lake and the building. Image © Zhi Xia

Strategy
The starting point is how to merge the new building to a complex environment and make it become a part of the landscape, and how to form a dialogue between the interior space experience and the surroundings; we hope the building can be a container of different urban fragments and act as a sensory medium to experience the scenery.

Layout based on topography
The shape of the land follows with the belt-type lakeshore, which is relatively long and narrow. The building’s overall layout complied with the topography and was divided into three volumes based on different functions. The three volumes are linked together through a wing space, two of which form two half closed yards with the volume, one is connected with a pool to form a sunken yard, the other is linked with a square to hold small gathering activities for people in the park.

Spatial forms
Tiandi Art Gallery includes Art Display & Exhibition Hall, Vanke Brand & Project Experience Center and Café House.

The gallery frequently displays contemporary artworks by local artists, therefore, we designed a double-height space to display them. The staircases were utilized to connect different display platforms which are varied in height and can be used to exhibit paintings, sculptures and installation art, or provide art education for children. In this design, we used the contrast of white walls and black stairs to weaken the internal space form.

Moreover, we focused on the visiting path, through which the indoor and outdoor scenes were closely linked together and the scenery became a part of the exhibition. The platform on the top borrows scenery from the distant mountains, aiming to evoke a feeling of mountain climbing while walking around the museum, and the light reflected through the high windows attract visitors to climb up.

The Brand Display & Project Experience Center is a single-storey space used for the introduction of Vanke’s Tiandi property, in which we provided a wide scale according to the requirements of planning model display and negotiation. During the design process, we consciously lowered the height of the space by the lakeside, in order to avoid the uncontrollable vision and keep the sight inside the park.

The Café House was raised to the second floor to bring the waterscape inside. On the one hand, a slightly tilted volume is echoing with the geometric relation of the overall form, on the other hand, it is trying to endow a simple box with certain space gestures and expressions through a personalized action.

Walking scenery
Therefore, being combined with functional demands and environmental characteristics, the three volumes show different gestures, namely, being “high”, “wide” and “raised”. If the height is a simulation of mountain, then the staircases are allusions of “paths”, and the wide french window is a response to the water features. Furthermore, the sight-view windows which highlight the building create a city montage on the whole visiting line.

Island trees and the building. Image © Zhi Xia

The three blocks are grouped together, and each has a different section view. The interior of the building does not emphasize its central feeling, however, with the “attraction” of objects and sceneries it creates interaction between visitors and the urban environment through the body’s movement, and translates environment features into spacetial experiences.

The exhibition and natural sceneries are connected through continuous paths, this concept has also been used in the landscape design. From the parking area, the culvert under the municipal road, lakeside plaza to the art platform, from the stairs, raised platform, floor windows, Café House to the glass corridor, all visitors are wandering inside the architecture as well as outside the space.

As we know, Le Corbusier praised highly the layout of Acropolis of Athens, in order to reproduce the spirit of place perceived by human behavior, his handling of space arrangement, hierarchical order and montage completed the connotation of free architecture, which is the core spirit he advocated in “Promenade Architecture”.