Project Overview

Located at the foot of Gele Mountain in the ancient town of Ciqikou in Chongqing Municipality, the Chongqing·1949 Grand Theatre is the first large-scale live-action theater in Chongqing tailored for the drama Chongqing · 1949. It is also the largest indoor mono-thematic theater in the world. With an overall floorage of 25,000 square meters and a building height of 28.6 meters, the theater can accommodate 1,500 spectators.

Organisation

CHINA STATE DECORATION GROUP COMPANY LIMITED

Team

Wangli
Hangyongtao

Project Brief

Chongqing·1949 Grand Theatre integrates the local characteristics of Chongqing into the design. Starting from the entrance to the first floor, the decoration plan is themed with "casting traces of revolutionary martyrs in landscapes". It extracts design elements from the city of mountains and rivers, such as stilted buildings, old brick walls, and ladders, and makes new interpretations with the design techniques of modern art, enabling them to glow with new life and show the characteristic mountain city culture.

Project Innovation/Need

The overall spatial style is based on the heavy gray tone, which, added with red decorations symbolizing the Red Rock culture, creates a solemn, awe-inspiring, introverted and deep space tone, to materialize the memory of the revolutionary martyrs. The cultural creativity area sets out with “running water" and "ladders", the first impressions of the Ciqikou wharf. The ceiling applies corrugated aluminum plates to highlight the water element of Ciqikou. The facades and ceilings of the cultural creativity stores are designed in an integral style, building a falling ladder modeling suffused with architectural features.

Design Challenge

Walking up the ladders, we may step into the second floor area. The overall design starts from the traditional architectural culture of Chongqing. The ceiling takes stilted buildings, a style of Chongqing traditional dwellings, as the prototype, extracts architectural component elements, and applies the design techniques of modern art for new interpretations. The third floor area of the grand theater is dominated by the long corridor. By integrating the arc walls of the corridor, the design maximizes the beauty of the architecture through the interspersed arc walls. It also applies the brick hole element, an architectural design technique, to highlight the combination of culture. At the same time, it reserves a display area on the walls for shows along with the exhibits arrangement or artworks in the later stage. The design of the fourth floor corridor follows the design technique that melts with the traditional culture of Chongqing. By reconstructing the tiles of old Chongqing, it realigns them through artistic techniques to rejuvenate them and integrate into the design in a new form.

Sustainability

Environmental protection has become a crucial aspect of spatial design, with a growing emphasis on related issues and concepts since the 1960s. For this project,The design team considered that the technology would be continuously advanced and updated in the future, and all the hardware and equipment will be replaced accordingly. Therefore, the design is based on a reduction method to avoid excessive waste of resources. The overall exhibition space is made of traditional and advanced materials, which reduces the cost and can be realized pretty quickly and indirectly reduces the experimental layout's resources consumed. In the primary space, large windows and mirrored ceilings are installed to welcome much natural light and make the space open and bright. In summary, it meets the client's needs for sufficient light sources during the daytime, reduces energy consumption, prolongs electric lights’ service life, and achieves energy saving and carbon reduction. Moreover, the building's structure is built using steel, which can be easily recycled at the end of its life cycle, promoting sustainable development. To further enhance energy efficiency, LED lights that conserve power are installed throughout the building. The installation of large solar panels on the roof also enables the use of regenerative green energy, allowing the building to reduce its reliance on traditional energy sources and, in turn, minimize its carbon footprint.