Stone clad art barn in the suburbs

Within a few years the art market in China has become the second largest in the world. There are several reasons for the boom, of which the most important are probably that the new rich do not trust the stock market and that art prices have experienced immense growth rates in the last three to four years. In 2011, six of the ten most expensive works of art worldwide were sold in China. In 2012 the figure was five. All these paintings were created by deceased twentieth century masters, unknown to the usual Western collectors. However, the unregulated auction market and the high profit rates foster forgeries and have been used to bribe politicians and decision makers. In October this year the New York Times reported about the problems of this overheated market.

In the context of this rapidly expanding art market, in recent years many private collectors have built museums for their own collections, which are often based on contemporary art from China. In Yantai, a prefecture-level city with 6.5 million inhabitants at the south side of the Bohai Sea in Shandong Province, a private collector commissioned CU office with the design for a museum to house his collection. The site of the new building is located directly on the city’s ugly fringes, a typical unregulated transitional zone with many speedily constructed and badly designed buildings for all kinds of purposes.

The conceptual design of the museum with a regular shape and a sloped roof, is based on the traditional Chinese architectural unit of »jian« (間). This term describes the space between two columns. In imperial China the number of jian in the timber buildings also reflected the status of the inhabitants: the more jians, the more important the inhabitant. The emperor's buildings were allowed to have nine jian at the most. In the case of the private art museum, called Villa Jian, the client required eleven jian to accommodate such different functions as private and public offices as well as private and public exhibition spaces. Altogether the brief was for a building of about 1,000 square meters, organised by the architects on two levels in a rectangular layout. The building has a strict east-west orientation on an irregularly shaped plot of land. The car parking is located to the north and a garden is planned for the southern part of the site. 

Conceptually the architects arranged the different functions on the ground and first floors around an x-shaped plan. The entrance space and the opposite space on the first floor are used for exhibitions. The other two parts contain the office spaces. The centre of the building is occupied by a wide staircase, which connects the two levels of exhibition space, and is used as an auditorium for meetings, lectures or simply to rest. The main exhibition space is lit by regulated natural light from windows along the ridge of the roof. A rather limited number of windows to connect the visitor to the surrounding landscape are integrated into the circulation space. As the entire interior of building, from floor to ceiling, is white, the only animation of the interior surfaces is created when direct sunlight casts stripes of light on the walls or floors.

The walls and the roof of the regular exterior of the barn-like building are clad in local marble, with all edges and corners evenly rounded. This homogeneous facing of the exterior with a slight sheen adds to the autonomy of the object-like building, which looks alien in the disordered environment. But the rapid urbanisation will soon reach the fringes of the city and the private museum can be seen as a forerunner of an orderly development in which all the neighbouring structures will be replaced. The design of the museum can therefore be considered as a first statement of a future to come, a sensitive and rational statement in an otherwise senseless situation.
Eduard Kögel