Cultural and Art Center Aesthetically Cladded in Metal Facade by Architecturestudio

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Images by RAWVISION studio, Olivier Marceny, SHUHE

The capital city of Shandong Province, Jinan is much more than the center of provincial politics, economy, culture, and education, as it’s also a tourist destination with exclusive natural features of “mountains, springs, lakes, and rivers” with far-reaching history and culture according to Archdaily website. The aesthetically looking project is located in the core area of West Jinan. A square site with each side up to about 400 meters long. The Grand Theatre is situated on the south side of the site. It consist of a total site area of 16.02 hectares, and a construction area of 380,000 square meters, as a significant landmark in local urban planning, divided into two phases, the project sated up to nearly 12 years from the competition to fully furnished, as the studio faced the challenges of site scale, building volumes, and urban planning scale.

Popularly known as the city of Springs, Jidan welcomed an exclusive architectural design started with spring with the Chinese vocabulary “Luoyunquanyong” as a concept which is translated into the flowing springs from Luo (the ancient name of Jinan) converge into a river. Its metaphor is collecting the cultural sources of the city into the site, making it artistic and concrete. The form of the structure rises and falls, like the surge of spring water. The Lashan River is the natural landscape in the site, and the project is divided into three sections along the river from south to north, creating two pathways that bring the waterfront landscape into the site. A north-south axis runs through the middle of the buildings, forming a public space with the entrance plaza in the southeast corner, and completes the main circulation linking the various functional buildings.

Phase I of this exclusive project includes the City Art Museum, the City Library, and the Mass Art Museum. Phase II includes a conference room, exhibition hall, hotel, office, commercial, and supporting facilities. The aesthetic Art Museum stands apart from the other two buildings and faces the entrance square. As a single structure with four levels, it includes one large exhibition hall, two medium exhibition halls, and four small exhibition halls.

The 35 meters high library is a steel structure, the first to the fifth level is public reading spaces with a collection of 1.2 million books, the 540-seat lecture hall and 1,600 square meters of academic exhibition area are on the underground floor, the Mass Art Museum is about 39 meters high with six levels. It includes the museum and offices of five art troupes. The museum contains a 775-seat theater and the Center for Intangible Cultural Heritage, as the project focuses on the cultural function, but the commercial area is also a significant part of the planning. The high-rise tower and podium building of phase II provide multiple commercial spaces with more possibilities for this functional complex.

Connected to the Mass Art Museum, the library features a double curtain wall system, with the outer facade made of pierced aluminum panels and the inner curtain wall made of light grey glass. The outer curtain wall’s design was inspired by the local natural landscape, and the images are pixelated and combined in different rhombus to form the facade. The size of the openings in the aluminum panels corresponds to their function, satisfying the need for light in the room while simultaneously taking into account the function of shading. The panels also carry the dynamic lighting design on the facade. At the same time, the studio considered the building lighting design as a part of the urban lighting planning and analyzed the alignment of the curtain wall lighting and landscape lighting. The design integrates diamonds, spring water, and ink as thematic elements into the lighting design. Its dynamic modes of it turn the city light into a soft and beautiful picture.

The inventive design thinker’s architectural studio brought poetry to the facade design and its construction details. Not simply highlighting the visual effects but making the building surface resonate with the surroundings. The hollowed-out randomly framed the city scenery from the inside of the building, creating unexpected surprises. Viewed from the outside, the light displays unique cultural labels of Jinan and delivers thousand years of history behind them.