CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

CULTURAL, CIVIC

Client: Nanchong City
Location: Nanchong, China
Program: Exhibition, art museum, cafe, retail, auditorium
Area: 1,798 m² (19,355 ft²)
Status: Competition, concept, first prize

The Contemporary Art Museum reimagines an architectural archetype—the acropolis, and questions “what is a ‘landmark’ in a society that relates to nature symbiotically as opposed to hierarchically?”

Respectfully altering yet intimately integrated into its site, the museum preserves the silhouette of its hilltop’s existing ridgeline while asserting a skyline inspired by the region’s terraced agricultural ponds. Intersecting umbrella canopies, each with a different height, respond to the site’s topographic contours and sculpt the diverse character of the museum’s interior spaces. Like a mushroom or lily pad, each canopy rises from a central column that organically expands into a flared capital, which doubles as a ceiling internally and a roof garden externally. Clustered into a ‘forest’, the canopies not only blur boundaries between inside and out via glass enclosures, but also from its underlying structural and spatial logic.