Chang’ansha Terminal

Part of Nanchong’s plans to sustainably expand northward through historic villages and towards protected mountains, this Contemporary Art Museum reimagines an architectural archetype—the acropolis—and questions, “What is the form of a ‘landmark’ in a society that relates to nature symbiotically as opposed to hierarchically.” Respectfully altering and intimately integrated into its site, the museum preserves the silhouette of its hilltop’s existing ridgeline. Intersecting umbrella canopies, each with a different height, flexibly respond to the site’s topographic contours to define the unique characters of the museum’s interior spaces. Like a tree or lily pad, each canopy rises from a central reinforced-concrete column that organically expands into a flared capital, which doubles as a ceiling internally and a roof garden externally. Collectively clustered like a forest, these canopies therefore not only blur boundaries between inside and out via its glass enclosure, but also from its underlying structural and spatial logic.

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