ATELIER DESHAUS

Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum is located inside a cultural and creative park that was converted from a former grain storage. The compound includes a number of factory buildings and warehouses of the Soviet style, which have been renovated into shops, restaurants, and offices. Though the renovated park is full of life, the feeling of the original grain storage was not well preserved. The Museum is newly built on a vacant site in the compound and faces a small plaza. From the site, one could see the continuous Feng Mountains on the east side behind a row of two-story buildings.

With a total floor area of 2,450 square meters, the Museum has eight exhibition spaces. Since each exhibition space is small in area while high-ceilinged, interlocking levels are used to decrease the overall height from the lower halls to the upper ones, and also modify the promenade rhythm . The spatial overlaps of the exhibition spaces on different levels creates an dynamic spatial sequence as well as rich experience for museum visitors.

The museum’s barrel-vault cast-in-situ concrete ceiling creates a unique ambience. The linear barrel-vaulted structure not only accommodates the exhibition lighting system, but also links the inside and the outside of the building. The circulation sequence begins with the exhibition space facing the plaza, as suggested by the barrel vault’s orientation, and then ascends and turns. The sequence ascends to the top exhibition space, facing toward the Feng Mountain, to which the top barrel vault is also turned, shaping a dialogue between structure and landscape. Similarly, the south facade of the Museum is composed of concaved curves, which appears to be extending the inner barrel-vaulted structure, and renders the frontality of the Museum to the plaza.

The rough surface cumulating inaccuracies and errors, resulting from the low-skilled pouring of the in-situ concrete, nevertheless results in an undesigned expressiveness. Throughout the construction, fixtures of doors and windows as well as interior design strategies had to continuously be adjusted on site to fit the changing conditions, resulting in a precious spatial quality that shaped from the inadvertent rawness of ruins.

source: Atelier Deshaus