Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts Extension / Neri&Hu Design and Research Office
Text description provided by the architects. The Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts is located at the beginning of Xi’an’s Datang Everbright City, south of the famous Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. The client asked for a new architectural icon at the museum’s eastern entrance. In response to the briefing, Neri&Hu’s proposal takes the idea of a monolithic urban monument as the guiding concept to not only satisfy the museum’s recently expanded cultural and commercial functions, but also to serve as an anchor and durable symbol of social history for the surrounding city. fabric. As the area around the site is occupied by existing galleries, the design intervention minimizes the impact of the new building through careful consideration of the architectural massing and detailing.
The building is composed of four parts: the partially sunken base, the Sculptural Walk circulation enclosure, the raised podium platform and finally the monument. The entire surface is finished with cast-in-place concrete. Partially submerged from the level of the existing square, the base is intended as a coherent public ground.
At the entrance to the 1st floor, Neri&Hu has partially retained the original wide steps. The stairs descend to connect to a sunken piazza. The solid concrete base contains the former museum rooms and restaurants, which have been retained, as well as newly installed functions such as shop premises and public toilets. These inserted functions complement the activities in the adjacent pedestrian street.
From the square on the ground level, a series of escalators lead to the underground museum on level B2. The escalators are hidden in a sculptural form that offers spaces with cross-sectional play between compression and expansion, covered by a three-story light well at the base of the sunken piazza, which gives a sense of drama and intrigue. Floating just above the sunken base is the Platform, which is expressed as a post and lintel structure; a grid of stone columns and glass curtain walls that support a floating roof houses retail space. This level of detail is deliberately expressed as a curtain wall to emphasize the separation between the carved language at the base and the circular sculpted mass of the civic strength above.
Capping off the new building is the Monument, which houses a lounge on the second floor and an outdoor amphitheater above. The elevation is composed of diamond-shaped red travertine masonry units arranged at intervals to emphasize the transmissivity of light. At the northwest end of the existing museum building, a passage leads directly to the second floor’s outdoor terrace, conceived as a hollowed-out bowl-shaped amphitheater. The terrace acts as a magnificent extension of the dining and entertainment programs in the lounge. This space acts as a forum open to the public as a meeting place for various activities, while also serving as a platform for private performances and catwalks.
