[LON21]

 
Image Credit : HE Lian

Silver 

Project Overview

The project is located in Tai'an, Shandong Province, facing Mount Tai across the road to the north and echoing the West Lake to the south. The site is low in the south and high in the north, with a height difference of nearly 20m. The art gallery is located on the west side of the plot. It is an exhibition area in the early stage and will be transformed into a community center in the later stage. At the same time, it is also the main entrance of the whole community. The architects try to use symbolic architectural language to express the spirit of the place. Specifically, the design imagines the two undulating and intertwining mountain ranges of Mount Tai as flying lines, thus forming the flowing and interlaced roof of the art gallery.

Project Commissioner

Beijing Dingfeng Real Estate Investment Consulting Co., Ltd

Project Creator

RUF Architects

Team

Lead Architects: QIAN Mingbo, JIANG Yaxiao
Design Team: LI Gang, XU Haoran, SUN Yao, GE Liangwei

Project Brief

The art gallery is a three-story building with a surface width of nearly 70m and a supporting area of 2,530 square meters. The gallery adopts the mathematical symbol "∞", which symbolizes infinite, to weaken the building volume. The smooth and boundless wall and the large glass curtain wall relieve the sense of pressure of the building.

The main building structure of plain grey stone and the cantilevered wooden eaves together make the whole building present a gentle temperament. In terms of internal design, large areas of cool white stone and warm wood structure create a detached space, adding a calm temperament to warmth. A large amount of white space can fully accommodate sunlight and enable the shadow of the artistic skylight to be engraved in the space.

Project Innovation/Need

The cornices reach an average of 4.5m, with the farthest exceeding 6m. The architects use 550 × 250 variable section wooden beams spaced 2 meters apart and 210 × 210 steel beams to reinforce diagonally, which are perfectly hidden under the roof boarding. The angle of the aluminium plate at the outermost edge is only 21.56°, ensuring the lightness of the eaves. The end of the wood beam of the variable section of eaves is narrowed, presenting a true expression of microscopic stress. The laminated wood materials adopt the prefabricated assembly form of on-site group assembly, which ensures the machining accuracy of wood components and avoids the assembly error adjustment problem of special-shaped structures.

Design Challenge

The biggest challenge in the project lies in the large span of structure and large space. The three-story interior column-free space reaches 16.6m at its highest point and 38.0m × 15.6m at the plane level. The final structural design adopts a steel-wood horizontal hybrid frame support system consisting of 22 600 × 400 wooden pillars, two ring beams and diagonal steel supports, so as to achieve the design requirements of large indoor space without columns. The profiled roof is another structural challenge that must be addressed. In order to keep the contour of the roof unchanged, we adopt the practice of sloping roof to ensure the effect of the original scheme and save the cost.

The profiled outline increases the difficulty of preventing the sloping roof skylight from leaking, so the slope gradient of the sloping roof skylight is increased. 1.5mm thick metal edge sealing plates are added at the junction of skylight glass and aluminum magnesium manganese tiles and sealed with weatherproof adhesive, and the skylight glass can be opened electrically.

Sustainability

Skylights on the roof provide plenty of natural light for the building, and air circulation inside and outside is optimized. The curtain wall adopts double-layer tempered super white insulating glass to melt the boundary between indoor and outdoor. Mount Tai is invited to enter the room, forming a beautiful picture of intimate interaction between nature and landscape. A large amount of white space can fully accommodate sunlight and enable the shadow of the artistic skylight to be engraved in the space.




This award celebrates the design process and product of planning, designing and constructing form, space and ambience that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations. Consideration given for material selection, technology, light and shadow. 
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