Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, founder of the Junya Ishigami + Associates studio, has unveiled the Zaishui Art Museum, located in China, on an artificial lake at the entrance of a newly developing district in Rizhao, Shandong Province.
The museum extends longitudinally for one kilometer, almost covering the entire diameter of the lake, and will have an area of 20,000 square meters.
The project is a complex for a new development in the city, serving also as an exhibition space, visitor center, and shopping center. The exhibition space currently displays chocolate and related artworks, but the plan is to be able to change the display content easily in future.
When contemplating architecture in China, that country’s vast, boundless landscapes can pose a daunting challenge. To build with the diminutive beast that is architecture any kind of equal relationship with the immense environment that is China, is very difficult indeed. There’s an air of resignation, of a forced severing from the environment, a compulsion to close off. There is something lonely about Chinese buildings that stand in isolation as if dropped into their limitless surroundings. How to treat environment and architecture as equals in the Chinese context? How to bring environment and architecture as close as possible to each other, how to make the boundary between them as ambiguous as possible, how to make nature the gentlest presence possible for us humans?
Junya Ishigami
Architecture and environment have been quietly extended, the building brushing the surface of the lake forming the site for a length of around 1km from end to end, about the same as the lake. The clear horizontal surface of the lake is drawn inside the building, with the floor, imagined as new land, extending to give a sense of skating on that lake surface, an environment on which humans cannot hope to walk.
Rows of columns stand in the water; floating on top of them, a sash-like roof. A new boundary between water drawn inside here, and the ground. All these elements are contemplated simultaneously.
Columns repeated at regular intervals define the new surface of the water, while the water’s edge created by that surface defines the new ground. A new exterior is born, in the structure’s interior. Thus a new nature, one able to sit gently alongside us, appears inside the architecture.
Junya Ishigami
Glass is fitted between the columns. In some sections it can be opened up when the weather is pleasant, giving the structure an airy quality as a gentle breeze is invited into the building to caress the skin. The lower sections of the glass panels, underwater, have gaps that naturally channel water from the lake indoors.
A long piece of architecture identical in scale to the vast landscape appears like a streak of wind passing over the lake. In some places the soft curve of the roof hangs low, contiguous with the lake surface and mountain slopes behind, and in others, it turns toward the sky, opening up generously and merging the interior of the building into the landscape outside.
“Key to addressing the problem of the landscape in China is to view the architecture as a ‘gentle giant’ of an environment, and search for a totally new relationship between natural and manmade. An entity emerges in which architecture standing in isolation sits comfortably in the natural environment, the two interacting. One discovers a natural environment inside the building, and through its characteristics as a new outside that has sprung up within the building, forges an amiable connection with the surrounding nature. Thus a new relationship between nature and humans.” – The designers explained.
Photo
arch-exist
