CUBE Art Museum at 798 / Studio Zhu-Pei
CUBE Art Museum at 798 / Studio Zhu-Pei
Text description provided by the architects. CUBE Art Museum, a renovation project, is located inside the 798 art district adjacent to Pace Art Museum and Minsheng Museum of Modern Art, both were also designed by Zhu Pei in 2009 and 2016 separately.
The idea of the art museum begins with the sensitive and in-depth observation of surroundings in a specific area, and the original old industrial plants are retained as many as possible. On this basis, new buildings are injected, so as to create tension between the new and old buildings and complement each other with surrounding industrial buildings, such as Pace Art Museum.
The design of the art museum traces the texture of the original industrial heritage, adopts a series of cubes to shape the order of orthogonal geometric shapes, and reflects the construction and planning logic of the 798 art district. It is particularly worth mentioning that the magically variable central courtyard transforms the original square surrounded by the three sides of industrial plants into a relatively closed central courtyard with the help of an independent cast-in-situ concrete wall. The huge steel beam sliding crane spans the concrete walls from north to south. It can not only hang art installations but also a mechanical traction device, which opens the canvas with natural drooping, approximately inverted arch, and variable shapes one by one. According to the weather and sunshine angle, these inverted arch canvases can be opened and closed at will for shading and rain protection. It is a place where people gather, a venue for the opening ceremony, and an outdoor exhibition.
This museum design also captures the material characteristics of industrial plants in the 798 art district, takes cast-in-situ concrete and red brick as the main materials, and highlights the construction characteristics of the joint and transformation between the structural form and the partition wall.
Once again, the design concept explored columnless, horizontally extended structural forms and tectonic expressiveness. The two newly built exhibition halls adopt the columnless long-span cast-in-situ concrete structure. One is the arched curved beam, which is diffused from the adjacent two arches with the natural skylight. The other is the concrete multi-ribbed beam to convey the characteristics of the material itself.
