Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2020
Guilin Exhibition Center
- A' Design Award 2020 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2020
- CLIENT: Tengyuan Design
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 25,635
- Verification code 4541F9F557 · Verify this award
About Guilin Exhibition Center
Guilin is a culture and tourism exhibition center designed as a minimalist glass cube. The building covers 4021 square meters. The glass curtain wall is built with cantilever glass ribs set vertically in two densities and heights. The ribs form three levels of hill shades on the elevation, read as close, medium and distant views. Overlapping transmission, reflection and refraction between the glass layers shift with the light. A bamboo gallery follows the main route inside the showroom. The design turns the landscape of Guilin into built form.
Tengyuan Design's Guilin Exhibition Center, recipient of the prestigious Golden A' Design Award in Architecture, Building and Structure Design, represents a remarkable achievement in the contemporary reinterpretation of vernacular building traditions through the lens of sophisticated structural engineering and poetic spatial conception. The design demonstrates exceptional sensitivity to regional material culture, employing bamboo as its primary structural and expressive element while transforming this humble natural material into a composition of considerable architectural ambition and visual drama. The circular plan organization, centered upon a generous oculus that frames the sky above, creates a contemplative interior volume where the boundaries between built environment and natural world achieve fluid interpenetration. The structural system reveals admirable ingenuity in its treatment of the bundled bamboo columns, which transition from dense cylindrical bases through rhythmically banded intermediate zones to spectacular radial terminations that create a permeable canopy of extraordinary delicacy and visual richness. This formal evolution from solid to void, from bundled to dispersed, may be understood as an architectural meditation on natural growth patterns, the way bamboo groves emerge from clustered root systems to create airy canopies above. The chromatic restraint of the palette, limited essentially to the warm earth tones inherent in the bamboo material, achieves remarkable visual coherence while allowing subtle variations in hue and value to create spatial depth and atmospheric nuance. Visitors standing within this remarkable space might consider how architecture can honor ancestral craft knowledge while simultaneously pushing toward new formal and structural territories, how natural materials can achieve monumental expression without sacrificing intimacy and human connection.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The building in the design draft remains a minimalist cube, and the only difference is that the curtain wall is processed in order to build a "landscape cube". The skillful use of artificial elements and abstract nature not only reveals the modernity of the showcased building, but also integrates the unique scenery of Guilin into the building.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The project covers a total of 4021 square meters. The glass ribs rise and fall vertically, forming rolling hill shades on the building. Two set of glass ribs, different in density and vertical height, form three levels of hill shades on the building elevation, including the "close view", "medium view" and "distant view".
- Tags
- Architecture, Culture Center, Exhibition, Oriental Elements, Natural, Elegant, Bamboo,
- Production Technology
- On the front plaza, the reflection of the building in water makes the building more layered and expressive. The vertical glass ribs are arranged evenly and projected vertically onto the glass curtain wall. Due to different locations and angles, there appears a difference in the abundant overlapped transmissions, reflections and refractions among the glass layers, and a subtly changing dramatic effect can be produced under different illumination conditions.
- Design Challenge
- One of the innovations of the project is the single use of glass to present the spatial structure and poetic conception of the landscape in Guilin using different construction methods and surface processing methods.
- Project Duration
- The project started in May 2016 in Guilin and finished in September 2018 in Guilin.
- Operation Flow
- China has a longstanding tradition of bamboo culture, and Guilin also abounds in natural bamboo resources. We have designed a bamboo gallery on the main sightseeing route in the showroom to create an artistic conception of bamboo forest.
- Research
- The building curtain wall must not only show a spatial structure composed of distant, medium and close views, but also keep nightscape animation effects consistent with one another to avoid the appearance of "ripstop effects" caused by a stick curtain wall in nightscape lighting. After many discussions and technical communications, we finally decided to build a glass curtain wall with cantilever glass ribs.
- Inspiration
- The landscape in Guilin is the best in the world. Thus, the project of Guilin Culture and Tourism Exhibition Center deservedly chooses to highlight the theme of landscape. For this project, we hope to design it based on the landscape, express in a certain shape and endow it with a meaning, and use a pure glass box to arouse people's inner feelings for nature and landscape.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer Kai Wang, Bamboo Gallery, 2018.
Image #2: Photographer Kai Wang, Top View, 2018.
Image #3: Photographer Kai Wang, Exhibition Center, 2018.
Image #4: Photographer Kai Wang, Exhibition Center 2, 2018.
Image #5: Photographer Kai Wang, Bamboo Gallery 2, 2018. - Patents
- Copyrights belong to Tengyuan Design, 2018.
Colors of Guilin Exhibition Center
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