The main construction of Luyeyuan is a museum of stone sculptures. The site of this project is a plain field between the riverbed and the woods, which is component of mainly four areas. On the largest one is located the major part of the museum, while the other three are arranged respectively for parking, open exhibition and subordinate building. Bamboos become the natural divisions of each part. Routes string different areas, gradually float upon the ground, through the bamboos and finally lead to the entrance above the lotus pond. Museum display is designed around an atrium, and the light, exhibits and the landscape are organized by carefully dealing with gaps between building blocks.
The museum collects stone sculptures, thus the architecture wants to tell people a story of “Artificial Stone”. As local construction technique is low and flexible modify afterwards is possible, a combined technique of frame structure with fair-faced concrete and shale bricks is created. Bricks on the inner side of the combined wall are used as a template to make sure that the concrete is poured vertically, as well as to serve later modifications as a soft liner. Indention templates with stripes are used to pour the fair-faced concrete walls of the main building in order that a clear pattern is formed, a strong impression of walls is made and the defect caused by the lack of experience on the pouring technique is hidden behind the dense and wild lattice. All these above are adopted to satisfy aesthetic and spiritual pursuits of the architect, at the same time, to solve various problems China today is being faced.
The architect hopes to find out a way, an approach to contemporary architectural aesthetic ideals while feasible and proper in local condition.
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By HAN Dong
1
It was inexplicable. My wife had given birth to a deformed baby. He had no hands. Where they ought to have been, there were just two little fleshy lumps. My wife cried her eyes out, and I was really sad too. The instant I saw him, it was as if my ‘inner eye’ lit up and I foresaw a future of unrelieved hardship and misery.
The tests showed that neither the wife nor I had any problems, so it wasn’t an inherited defect. The doctors thought the foetus might have been damaged by radiation during pregnancy. The wife remembered that when she was three months’ pregnant, their offices had been redecorated. When she was six months, the company had sent the staff on a holiday and they’d travelled both ways by plane. This calamity may have been caused by airport security equipment.
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Liu Jiakun was born in 1956 and established Jiakun architects in 1999. His projects were shown in enormous exhibitions such as Chinese Contemporary Architecture in the Pompidou Center, Paris (2003), Chinese Young Architects’ work Exhibition in Berlin (2001) and the Chinese Contemporary Architecture Exhibition in the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, among others. He has also won the ARCASIA Award for Architecture, the 2003 Chinese Architecture Art Prize, etc. His works were presented in a+u, AV, area, MADE IN CHINA, AR and other publications. He was invited to lecture at MIT, the Royal College of Art in London and many Chinese universities.
Han Dong was born in Nanjing in 1961. He used to live in a North Jiangshu village as his father was banished to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he was admitted by the Department of Philosophy, Shandong University and was sent to work in Xi’an after the graduation. In 1984 he was sent back to Nanjing to teach in college, and quitted the teaching job nine years later to become a full-time writer. He founded the famous private-owned magazine Them and published 10 volumes from 1985 to 1995. He was regarded as an important figure in “the Third Generation Poem” movement. Han Dong has been a major player on the modern Chinese literary scene since the 1990s mainly as a novelist, and started to write long stories since 2000. In 1998, he initiated the literal action “rupture” together with Zhu Wen to declare the differentiation with classic Chinese contemporary literature. He was the editor of literature periodical Furong from 2000 to 2004. He contributed to the foundation of literal websites Them and Rubber. In 2007, he became the editor of Today magazine. His works include: the White Stone and Dad’s Looking Down on Me From the Sky as poetry collections; Han Dong’s essays and Dynamics Of Love as essay collections; Our Bodies, My Plato, Bright Scars and In the Western Sky as short story collections; Banished!, Me and You, A Small Town Hero Strides Forth as full-length novels and many other works.
