Expressive Structure  

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Expressive structure makes a gallery, a performing-arts center, and two new museums stand out. This section highlights extraordinary construction and engineering achievements.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © JEFF GOLDBERG

WRIGHTWOOD 659, CHICAGO, TADAO ANDO

Making Waves

Artificial hills are alive with the sound of music at this performing-arts center.

National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts | Taiwan | Mecanoo

By Clifford A. Pearson

Part landscape, part architecture, the 1.51 million-square-foot National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts tucks a collection of performance halls beneath a 35-acre artificial terrain that rolls like hills. Floating at one end of a park that had been a military base, the $366 million complex—the largest performing-arts center under one roof—seems to ooze from below its immense lid, blurring the boundaries between indoors and out, solid and void. The Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo created an undulating middle realm between roof and ground that provides access to four indoor auditoria while remaining open to breezes and views of the park on all sides. Inspired by the large banyan trees that grow on the site and provide welcome shade, with their long, arching branches, the architects enveloped this interstitial space in a curving steel canopy that slides down to wrap around the elliptically shaped theaters. Called Banyan Plaza, it provides a cool retreat from the subtropical sun and frequent rains—a place where anyone can come to do tai chi in the morning, jog in the afternoon, or watch films projected on its underside in the evening.

In Kaohsiung, a city near the southwest tip of Taiwan, night markets and street performances animate the public realm after dark, when temperatures drop. The architects hope their Banyan Plaza works in the same way, luring people to dance, sing, and sketch, while others come to attend ticketed events indoors. “We wanted to capture the city’s wonderful mix of informal and formal,” says Francine Houben, founding partner and creative director of Mecanoo.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © IWAN BAAN

CURVE APPEAL
The bulbous roof covers 35 acres. Interior passages allow visitors to move from one venue to the next (right).

A built-up roof resting on a steel frame buffers the performance halls underneath from the sound of rain and outdoor noise while etching an eye-catching profile against the horizon and acting as the projects’ fifth facade. On one side, it dips down to touch the ground and form an outdoor amphitheater with stepped seating that allows visitors to climb this part of the building. The indoor venues range from a 2,236-seat opera house to a 1,981-seat concert hall, a 1,210-seat playhouse, and a 434-seat recital hall. People attending performances enter the individual halls from the public plaza and can also circulate from one venue to another on the third level, a fully enclosed floor that connects all of the auditoria, offering spaces such as bars, cafés, and lobbies where audiences can relax during intermissions.

Referring to the way the building and the surrounding park merge, Chien Wen-Pin, the performance center’s artistic and executive director says, “The design demonstrates that the arts should be a seamless part of people’s lives, to be accessed without borders.” Open 24 hours a day without charge, the sinuous spaces of Banyan Plaza, many of which offer peeks into rehearsal and performance halls, underscore that message. “We want the plaza to be Kaohsiung’s living room, where anyone can come at any hour,” says Houben.

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY MECANOO

IN THE WORKS
The steel panels range in size from 3⅓ by 10 feet to 13 by 20 feet; they were assembled on-site into larger modules and backed with rectangular steel stiffeners.

Called Weiwuying after the park in which it stands, the complex reflects Kaohsiung’s transformation over the past 15 years from a harbor city with a mostly industrial economy to a more diverse metropolis, where parks and cultural facilities attract well-educated Taiwanese and offer tourists a reason to visit. During the 12 years it took to design and build Weiwuying, the local and national governments have connected the city to the capital, Taipei, and to Taichung, the country’s second-largest city, via high-speed rail, and opened a subway system for Kaohsiung. The first phase of a new transit station, also designed by Mecanoo, officially opened the day after the arts center and features extensive landscaped areas and a covered public plaza that express some of the same ideas but in different form.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © CHRISTIAN RICHTERS

The undulating roof comprises a tubular steel space frame.

Part of a network of national performing-arts centers, this latest one joins Taipei’s National Theater and Concert Hall, which opened in 1987; the National Taichung Theater, designed by Toyo Ito, which debuted in 2016 (record, December 2016); and the Taipei Music Center, by Reiser + Umemoto, opening next year. As both a major arts center and a piece of architecture, Weiwuying serves as an element in Taiwan’s effort to assert its “soft power” as a cultural magnet in the region.

Houben calls it a “sandwich building,” with the negative space of the open plaza being as important as the enclosed elements above and below it. Visitors roaming this interstitial realm experience the complex as if it were a giant sculpture by Rachel Whiteread, the British artist who often creates concrete or plaster casts of building facades and rooms. Like Whiteread’s work, Weiwuying plays with our sense of positive and negative, ­constructed and leftover.

Mecanoo, however, decided to use steel plates rather than poured-in-place concrete to envelop Banyan Plaza’s curvaceous spaces and enclose the performance halls. The quarter-inch-thick plates, which acknowledge Kaoh­siung’s history as a shipbuilding center, are welded together and painted a grayish white to retain the rugged look of a “cargo ship, not a yacht,” says Houben.

“We wanted a pure, ‘single’ material, not something molded by forms that are then thrown away,” says Friso van der Steen, Mecanoo’s technical director and a partner at the firm. The panels, cold-bent in shipyards in Taiwan and the Netherlands, range in size from 3⅓ by 10 feet to 13 by 20 feet and were assembled on-site into larger modules and backed with rectangular steel stiffeners. Then they were hoisted into place and welded into a continuous, seamless surface. “That’s the way ships are built, so they don’t leak,” says van der Steen.

Suspension rods and fork-shaped steel brackets connect the modules to the building’s underlying structure, which combines a tubular-steel space frame with poured-in-place concrete foundations and vertical circulation cores. Large steel springs behind the steel skin act as dampers and allow the building envelope to move independently of the structure during seismic events and storms. Using steel panels in the high-traffic public plaza also reduced maintenance issues. “They’re basically indestructible and won’t crumble or chip,” says van der Steen. Like Banyan Plaza’s skin, the building’s giant roof has no expansion joints and was designed to “float like a ship” during earthquakes, says van der Steen.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © SHAWN LIU STUDIO (LEFT) AND IWAN BAAN (RIGHT)

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE
One performance hall features champagne-hued oak (left). A large chunk of the roof is scooped out to provide an outdoor amphitheater (right).

Because visitors enter the performance halls from different parts of the rolling plaza, which can vary in altitude by as much as 16 feet, the architects were able to eliminate some stairs and simplify circulation. Each of the halls has its own character, with specific materials and colors, such as champagne-hued oak, maple plywood, and seat fabrics that range from opera-hall red to a bright blue. Paris-based Albert Yaying Xu served as the acoustic consultant for all of the halls, working with the architects to create the right reverberation time and sound for each one. Glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum panels on the walls and ceilings help shape the acoustics for each hall. A mechanical plant for the entire complex is placed underground to reduce noise. For the same reason, engineers specified a displacement ventilation system, with ducts in the floors supplying conditioned air at low velocities to cool the space around theater­goers. An underground story connects all of the auditoria, providing areas for moving sets and equipment, circulating people, and ­parking cars.

PHOTOGRAPHY: IWAN BAAN (LEFT); COURTESY NATIONAL KAOHSIUNG CENTER FOR THE ARTS (RIGHT)

In Banyan Plaza, circular chandeliers equipped with LED fixtures supplement daylight supplied by light wells (left). Film screenings on the plaza’s steel-wrapped surfaces are popular events (right).

To bring daylight into such a sprawling building, Mecanoo punched large openings into the roof above the third-floor crown that connects all the halls, and through the steel-plate enclosure above Banyan Plaza. Some of the third-floor apertures are skylights, while others create outdoor terraces where visitors can bring drinks and snacks from adjacent bars and cafés during intermissions.

By carving out a variety of spaces from the bulk of the enormous building, Mecanoo toys with our perception of scale, making the gargantuan seem accessible, even intimate in places. And the project’s visual vocabulary of fluid forms and seaworthy volumes undermines standard notions of what’s solid, what’s empty, what’s open, and what’s closed. Navigating such a complex can be challenging and requires an exploratory state of mind, but it engages users with the building in a way that will reward repeat visits.

Credits

Architect: Mecanoo — Francine Houben, partner in charge; Nuno Fontarra, project architect; Friso van der Steen, project director
Associate Architect: Archasia Design Group
Engineers: Supertech (structural); Yuan Tai (mechanical); Heng Kai (electrical)
Consultants:Xu-Acoustique (acoustics); CMA lighting (lighting); CDC (roof and facade); Theateradvies (theater)
Client: Ministry of Culture
Size: 1.51 million square feet
Cost: $366 million (total); $280 million (construction)
Completion Date: October 2018

Sources

Roofing: Bemo
Steel Skin of Banyan Plaza: CIG, Ching Fu Shipbuilding
Stage Systems: Waagner Biro
Theater Seating: Kotobuki Seating

Monument to Valor

An inventive circular structure is home to a new institution celebrating veterans.

National Veterans Memorial and Museum | Columbus, Ohio | Allied Works

By Joann Gonchar, FAIA

It is amazing we got it built,” says architect Brad Cloepfil of his design for the National Veterans Memorial and Museum (NVMM), which recently opened on the banks of the Scioto River, in Columbus, Ohio. Now, nearly six years after his firm, Allied Works, won an invited competition for the $75 million project, Cloepfil still seems incredulous—largely because of the 53,000-square-foot building’s demanding structure. The roughly circular NVMM comprises a series of exposed concrete arches that are curved in plan and overlap to create three intersecting rings and a spiraling circulation path, both inside and out. The behavior of the unusual form was tricky to analyze, and its construction was labor-intensive, according to Thorsten Helbig, a partner of Knippers Helbig, the project’s New York– and Germany-based structural engineer. The poured-in-place structure was so challenging that, Joann Gonchar, FAIA after participating in a design-assist phase, the preselected ­concrete contractor declined to bid on the building’s construction. It took two months to find another qualified contractor. “I had never designed a building that no one wanted to build,” Cloepfil says wryly.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JEREMY BITTERMAN, EXCEPT AS NOTED; AERIAL IMPACT SOLUTIONS (RIGHT)

SANCTUARY IN THE SKY
The NVMM, conceived as a series of intersecting arch-supported rings (left and right), is wrapped by an exterior ramp that leads to an amphitheater-like plaza with views of the Columbus skyline.

The idea for what would become the NVMM was first conceived by the late U.S. senator and astronaut John Glenn, who was also a Marine Corps fighter pilot. Although Glenn’s initial goal was recognizing veterans from Ohio, the project’s ambitions ultimately expanded to include all of the country’s servicemen and -women. At its core, however, the primary goal remained consistent: to celebrate veterans and honor their service and sacrifice. The new entity is distinct from other military museums, which are typically dedicated to a single branch of the armed services or one particular conflict. “There is no other institution like this,” claims Amy Taylor, COO of the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation. The NVMM is part of a larger effort to revitalize the Scioto Peninsula, directly across the river from downtown.

In order to create a home for the NVMM, which is part shrine and part civic-engagement initiative, Cloepfil decided on arches since “they are somewhat ceremonial.” But his chief desire was to “consecrate or set apart” a place for veterans on the seven-acre site, which at the time of the competition was home to an outdated conference facility slated for demolition. His inventive structure seems to emerge from a grass-covered hillock. It supports an ascending serpentine ramp that culminates in an amphitheater-like plaza encircled by a swath of green roof. “It is as though we lifted the earth and inserted the museum underneath,” he says. This “sanctuary in the sky” is intended for memorial services or other ceremonies, and as a place where visitors can take in views of the downtown skyline, watch runners and cyclists pass by on Columbus’s recently revamped river walk, or appreciate the surrounding landscape designed by OLIN, which features a grove of elm trees and a reflecting pond.

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY ALLIED WORKS

INHABITABLE SCULPTURE
The rings, which were explored in a number of ways, including concept models and as unfurled elevations (top) define interior spaces, such as a the double-story great hall (bottom, left), for dinners and other functions, and the permanent exhibition area (bottom, right).

Inside, where the exposed muscular structure and the helical circulation route continue, there are more spaces for both gathering and contemplation, such as a double-story great hall for dinners and other functions and a below-grade, circular “cyclorama” for meetings or temporary exhibits. A mezzanine level looks out onto the rooftop plaza through windows with glazing striped in multiple colors inspired by the service bars that members of the military wear on their uniforms. But most of the interior is devoted to a permanent multimedia exhibition developed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which snakes through much of the perimeter and middle rings. Above the displays, the composite steel-and-concrete roof structure and the wood-louvered ceiling gradually slope downward to create an intimate space. Visitors feel almost as though they are alone while they take in NVMM’s displays, including videos relating to the personal stories of veterans, told in their own voices. Joshua, for example, describes his urge, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, to leave West Point early and enlist; Jaspen talks about her desire for her son to see her as a soldier rather than a single mother; and Thom, who emigrated from Vietnam as a child, and whose father had been imprisoned by the Viet Cong, explains that he joined the army “to give back to the country that let me call it home.”

While these narrations can be sobering and intense, the generous areas of glazing inserted within the perimeter ring of arches provide sunlight and a visual connection to the city. “Visitors can step away and go to the window,” says Cloepfil. But, unfortunately, although people on the inside can see out, those on the outside can’t see in, since keeping heat gain in check necessitated tinted glazing that appears almost black in typical daytime conditions. The lack of transparency is off-putting, lending the building a somewhat forbidding character that detracts from its compelling form and the project team’s significant structural achievement.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © BRAD FEINKNOPF (LEFT)

COLOR GUARD
A stair that hugs an inner concrete ring takes visitors from the great hall (left) to a mezzanine level (right). It looks out onto a rooftop plaza through glazing striped to recall the service ribbons that adorn military uniforms.

And the structure is significant. As just one example of its complexity, Helbig points to the curved chain of arches, explaining that their structural behavior is less straightforward than that of typical planar arches, which transfer forces to the ground in pure compres­sion. Along with compression, the NVMM arches respond to loads with bending. But the shape of the arches was not the only source of engineering challenges. Since the concrete bands also overlap—which creates the impression ­that they slip past one another—transferring forces between the seemingly sliding pieces required connection details that include intricately interwoven steel reinforce­ment. Throughout, there is a high density of rebar, with as many as 51 longitu­dinal layers in some locations. The steel helps resist torsional forces and control the quality of the concrete surface, explains the engineer.

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY ALLIED WORKS

The NVMM’s poured-in-place concrete structure includes an unusually high density of reinforcing steel.

The quantity of reinforcement brought with it a host of other problems, namely, tuning the self-consolidating concrete mix to ensure that it flowed without forming voids or large cracks. Contractors and engineers also needed to carefully consider the arches’ construction sequence so that the concrete rings would appear monolithic, even though they were made in multiple pours, says Helbig.

The resulting concrete work has been very well executed, though it is not pristine: the outlines of the edges of the plywood forms are visible, as is the occasional hairline crack. But the structure was never intended to be “precious,” says Cloepfil, and the slight imperfections do enhance, rather than diminish, its materiality and its formal power. If only the NVMM were more transparent, it would have been a building that was approachable and welcoming without blunting its sculptural presence.

Credits

Architect: ALLIED Works — Brad Cloepfil, founding principal; Kyle Lommen, principal in charge; Chelsea Grassinger, project lead; Nathan Hamilton, project architect; Kyle Caldwell, Chris Brown, Rachel Schopmeyer, Alexis Kurland, Luciana Varkulja, project team
Associate Architect: Design Group
Consultants: Knippers Helbig (structural); Prater Engineering Associates (m/e/p/fp); EMH&T (civil); OLIN (landscape); Ralph Appelbaum Associates (exhibit design); Arup (lighting, security); Reg Hough Associates (concrete)
General Contractor:Turner Construction
Client: Columbus Downtown Development Corporation
Size: 53,000 square feet
Cost: $75 million
Completion Date: October 2018

Sources

Concrete: Baker Concrete Construction
Lighting: Litelab, Gotham, Elliptipar, FC Lighting
White Oak Flooring: Kasell
Roof Pavers: Tectura Designs
Elevator: Schindler

The Big Reveal

An ordinary apartment building on a quiet block is revamped as a stunning space for art.

Wrightwood 659 | Chicago | Tadao Ando Architect & Associates

By Naomi Pollock, FAIA
Photography By Jeff Goldberg

From the street, Wrightwood 659 reads as a typical Chicago apartment building from the 1920s. But behind this anonymous redbrick wrapping stands a privately-owned gallery designed by the Pritzker Prize–winner Tadao Ando. Dedicated to architecture and socially engaged art, the gallery interior takes visitors entirely by surprise. Its big reveal is a soaring three-story atrium extending the original building’s full height and clad entirely with Chicago common brick. Walking a fine line between showcasing the new while respecting the old, this jaw-dropping space turns the mundane into the monumental.

OUTSIDE IN
The redbrick apartment building sits next door to the same client’s concrete house (left). The soaring atrium and its stair is the pièce de résistance of Ando’s design (right).

Based in Chicago’s sister city of Osaka, Japan, the architect has a long history with the Windy City, home to his first two built works in the United States: the Art Institute’s Japanese-screen gallery, which opened in 1992, and a house for philanthropist and activist Fred Eychaner, completed in 1997. Some 15 years later, Eychaner asked Ando to turn his adjacent property, a 38-unit apartment building, into an art venue. The catch was, the building’s brick exterior had to stay. “We wanted to respect the context of the mixed, residential street,” explains Eychaner.

“I thought this would be difficult,” says Ando, “but I really felt that the brick walls symbolized Chicago.” His response was to gut the interior completely, insert a new concrete-and-steel structure, and pop up an additional floor, penthouse-style. This building-within-a-building concept is reminiscent of other Ando projects, such as Venice’s Punta della Dogana, Paris’s Bourse de Commerce, and the Ando Museum on the island of Naoshima in Japan—a traditional wood house turned concrete-lined gallery. Though larger in scale, Wrightwood 659’s residential interior underwent a similar rebirth.

This time, the building opens with a vestibule that leads to the atrium, where a concrete stair tower ascends to the second and third floors. While support functions fill out the first floor, both upper levels contain lobby-like balconies followed by pristine, white-walled galleries sandwiched between narrow slots of mechanical and circulation space. The third-floor gallery culminates in an elevated double-height area that can serve as an informal stage. From there, stairs go up to the skylit fourth-floor gallery, followed by a lobby and a corridor linking roof terraces at either end. Reconnecting with the city, the north terrace opens to the street’s tree canopy, the south to a skyline view toward downtown, and the corridor to the client’s adjacent home and reflecting pool.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © MITCHELL CANOFF

THE MASTER’S HAND
Ando is photo-graphed inside the new gallery.

All four floors (plus the basement) are supported by a composite concrete-and-steel structural system. To stabilize the brick walls, a bracing frame needed to be built before the innards could be demolished. This entailed strategically cutting holes in the existing interior walls, floors, and the roof, and then using those openings to construct a three-dimensional grid of steel girts and flange columns that anchor the exterior walls. After deconstruction, this steel skeleton was utilized as the permanent structure by spanning the beams with poured-in-place concrete joists connected with cast-in-place joints. “This [method] was more expensive, due to the formwork, but it has high load capacities,” explains William Bast, a principal at Thornton Tomasetti, the project’s structural engineer.

The brick-clad atrium culminates in a wood-lined ceiling (left). The inaugural exhibition showcases Ando’s work, including his Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan (right).

For additional strength, as well as for its aesthetic qualities, the steel columns were also encased in concrete. While steel micro-piles transfer the vertical load to bedrock, push piles fortify the foundations beneath the brick walls. This extra bolstering was essential, since the live loads of the old apartments were considerably less than the bearing capacity of 300 pounds per square foot the client requested for the anticipated art installations. Measuring 18 inches thick, the atrium walls incorporate the existing masonry plus an additional layer of tan-colored bricks, salvaged during demolition.

ON DISPLAY
For additional strength as well as aesthetics, steel columns were encased in concrete (left). The upper-floor gallery is skylit (right).

To help meet the gallery’s interior climate requirements and prevent condensation, the engineers devised thermally broken connections between the new steel elements and the existing masonry wall. These consist of a face-mounted plate attached with stainless-steel adhesive anchors and separated from the outer masonry with a nonconductive shim. The inner, salvaged bricks are mounted with rigged back joints and ¾-inch-deep recessed mortar, creating deep shadows when illuminated, turning a utilitarian material into a rich interior finish.

A story was added to the existing structure, offering views of Chicago’s skyline and of the client’s concrete house next door, also designed by Ando.

Fittingly, Wrightwood 659’s inaugural exhibit, Ando and Le Corbusier: Masters of Architecture, pairs Ando with the architect who influenced him profoundly. Though the two never met–Le Corbusier died just prior to Ando’s first visit to Paris in 1965–the parallels between their emotive concrete forms and elegant use of light are underscored by showing their works in tandem. Washington University professor Eric Mumford curated the Le Corbusier displays, while architectural historian Dan Whittaker selected the Ando buildings, culminating in Ando’s three major museums in the United States: the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The exhibit “helps you to understand Ando’s work as part of the continuum of the history of modern architecture,” explains Mumford.

It also highlights Ando’s great admiration for Le Corbusier. Yes, his architecture has been an inspiration for Ando, but even more has been Corb’s willingness to go against convention. Le Corbusier “was very brave and kept fighting; I really applaud his courage,” explains Ando. An outstanding achievement that will inspire others, Wrightwood 659 too is the product of an architect with a courageous spirit and iron will.

Credits

Architect: Tadao Ando Architect & Associates — Tadao Ando; Masataka Yano, principal; Kazutoshi Miyamura, associate
Associate Architect: Vinci|Hamp Architects, Gensler
Engineers: Thornton Tomasetti (structural); AEI (m/e/p)
General Contractor:Norcon
Client: CFAB — Fred Eychaner, Daniel J. Whittaker
Size: 37,200 square feet
Cost: withheld
Completion Date: May 2018

Castle in the Sand

A subterranean museum with spectacular domelike galleries opens up to ocean views.

UCCA Dune Art Museum | Qinhuangdao, China | OPEN Architecture

By Aric Chen
Photography By Wu Qingshan

A passerby could easily miss the new UCCA Dune Art Museum, by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing of Beijing-based OPEN Architecture. Located on a strip of sand on the Bohai Sea—not far from Beidaihe, the summer retreat of China’s Communist Party leaders—the 10,000-square-foot museum lies mostly hidden, literally buried within one of the last remaining natural dune formations on the country’s northeast coast.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © NI NAN

BEACHFRONT PROPERTY
Visitors enter through a long tunnel (left). The museum’s outdoor terraces poke out from the sand and scrub (right).

From the outside, just a few tubular skylights, a small stair tower, and glimpses of the parabolic concrete shells tracing the museum’s outdoor terraces poke out from the sand and scrub. Inside, daylight filters generously into a warren of seven otherwise cavernous galleries, their domelike spaces warping and shape-shifting like a cluster of giant soap bubbles fossilized in concrete. “It connects to something ancient and timeless,” Li says of the project, whose three terraces open to expansive sea views. “We wanted to encourage people to think about their relationship with art, and with nature,” Huang adds.

While the museum opened in October as an outpost of the well-regarded Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, its function wasn’t fully determined at first. Situated in a quiet corner of a sprawling, impeccably pruned enclave of luxury homes, shops, and resort hotels, OPEN’s project is one of several “follies”—including a widely publicized library and chapel by the Chinese studio Vector Architects—that were commissioned for the beachfront by Aranya, the property developer.

The original brief vaguely called for a space for art and dining. Midway, the art took over, prompting OPEN to convert a planned kitchen into the museum’s only somewhat rectangular gallery (a small café remains). However, changes in program were hardly the only cause for improvisation. The museum’s construction called for excavating the existing dune and erecting the museum’s structure before replacing the sand on top. (“We built into the dune in order to save it,” Li says of the formation, which would probably have been slated for demolition.) The entire building—including a dramatic, structural spiral stair leading up to the dune’s ridge—would be cast in concrete. But the question remained as to how.

Li and Huang took broad license in exploring possibilities. They considered specially fabricating steel ribs and trusses that could support concrete formwork. However, that proved to be too time-consuming and costly. They explored using CNC-­milled foam, but the foam would be too fragile. Taking an experimental and conceptual leap, they even looked at erecting mounds of sand that could be sprayed in shotcrete and then hollowed out once the latter set—“sort of obvious, given the context,” Li says—or, even more radically, doing the same using blocks of ice. (“We first visited here in winter, and were struck by how the ocean was frozen,” Huang explains.)

OTHERWORDLY
The subterranean galleries are filled with daylight, thanks to skylights and generous glazing.

In the end, the answer was indeed right in front of them, floating on the water. The ­surrounding area is known for its fishing boats. And with more advanced fabrication techniques being unfeasible, the architects turned to the local contractors, whose experience in boat construction meant they knew how to create complex curves in wood.

While the structure’s geometry was exactingly precise, its method of construction wasn’t. With a lattice of rebar in place, thus began an iterative design-build process that played out in real time as the contractors bent wood slats, planks, and boards into formwork, making on-the-spot adjustments along the way. There were digital models, of course, and lots of data, but also a 1:50 scale maquette for eyeballing. (A full-scale mock-up of one of the smaller galleries, which could be repurposed as a beachside changing room, was also erected.)

A muscular spiral stair (top, right) connects the rooftop (top, left) to the galleries and to a viewing platform up high. Like the galleries, the spare café is a domelike space whose concrete shell reveals the process of its making through its jumble of patterns and textures (bottom).

To further complicate matters, the concrete would need to be thicker at the base, while doorways and skylight apertures called for extra rebar reinforcement. On paper, 200-square-foot windows providing unobstructed views to the water could be easily mounted from the exterior. But, in reality, the building’s geometry got in the way, requiring workers to devise custom pulleys to install them from the inside. Throughout, details had to be continuously redrawn. And while the museum’s geothermal heating and cooling lay hidden beneath the floor, a grid of recessed spotlights were cast into the concrete above—and, as Li says, “you only get one chance at that.”

Most visibly, however, the formwork itself required a string of impromptu solutions, as different curves required different sizes of wood oriented in different directions—and, when all else failed, the workers cannily resorted to using sheet metal and even rubber tubing instead. Heightened by its contrast with the building’s polished white terrazzo floors, the resulting concrete shell almost viscerally reveals the process of its making through its jumble of patterns, textures, and even staple marks imprinted by the formwork.

PHOTOGRAPHY: © COURTESY OPEN ARCHITECTURE

BY THE SEA
The architects turned to local shipbuilders for the formwork (top, left and right). The inaugural exhibition explores the shifting relationship between humans and nature in light of China’s last three decades of breakneck development (bottom)

From the start, Li and Huang had anticipated such flaws and planned to smooth them over with a layer of plaster. Then “we saw how beautiful the imperfections were and decided to keep them,” Huang says. And so the concrete was left exposed, adding to the sense, as Li puts it, that “the whole building is handcrafted.”

THE SHELTERING SKY
The terraces offer expansive ocean vistas after a visit to the galleries, and also double as outdoor exhibition areas.

In fact, the museum is one of a pair that OPEN has designed for the site; work is expected to begin next year on a “Sea Museum” that will be reached by a 500-foot-long causeway designed to disappear beneath the water at high tide. The Dune Museum, on the other hand, is not just embedded in the landscape. It also tracks the sky: two of its skylights orient to the sun at the summer and winter solstices, while others are designed to capture daylight or cast it on the walls.

When it came to the building’s construction, OPEN both drew from local know-how and embraced its limitations. The architects also skillfully worked with the terrain. When Li says that “we wanted to create a deep connection with the site,” he perhaps means it in more ways than one.

Aric Chen is an independent curator and writer based in Shanghai.

Credits

Architect: OPEN Architecture — Li Hu, Huang Wenjing, principals in charge; Zhou Tingting, Wang Mengmeng, Hu Boji, Fang Kuanyin, Joshua Parker, Lu Di, Lin Bihong, Ye Qing, Steven Shi, Jia Han, project team
Engineer: TCABR Technology (structural, mechanical, curtain wall)
Consultant: X Studio of the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University (lighting)
Client: Aranya
Size: 10,000 square feet
Cost: withheld
Completion Date: October 2018

Sources

Controls: Lutron
Hardware: Dorma
Chairs: Emeco
Sunshades: Silent Gliss International
Outdoor Decking: Woodn