English Text by Selina Lum
Picture Courtesy of Ray & Emilio Studio
This architectural project is given a meaningful name of “Screen Pavilion”, which is the most exemplary of the public service pavilions in the China’s Xianghu Scenic Area. Xianghu is the core scenic spot of urban life in Hangzhou. It has a long history where the Yue dynasty was located in the Spring and Autumn Warring State Period. Now the Xianghu Lake area has been renovated into a city park that accommodates the life of the local community, establishing a public service pavilion that will provide citizens and tourists a better place to stay.
The pavilion looks out over the lake, the beach, and the stone arch bridge. Behind the pavilion is the hillside, the road and the gallery pavilion. All the scenery is on the edge of the lake. The “Screen Pavilion” is also in this beautiful place.
△ Entrance towards the internal space.
The “Screen Pavilion” is so blended in with the surrounding natural scenery, and imbues the stylish architectural magnificence with the existing natural landscape. Unorthodoxy of a simple opening that only brings about disorganization of the environment and perspective. Therefore, the design concept is that this kind of openness can present itself in a state mixed with the “Screen”, a state between occlusion and openness, just as praised in Chinese ancient poetry. Old idiom once said “Her face still half hidden behind a pipa lute” that is the most traditional Chinese aesthetic perception. The “Screen” design endeavors to achieve the kind of landscape beauty with reverie and expanded possibilities of imagination.
△From the other side of the road, one can perceive an opening made up of a screens.
The “Screen” as an Articulation
The design team made a major structural transformation of the “screen”, during this the “Screen” is used as an installation of art, defining it as an “articulation” of space, forming linkages between architecture and the nature, people and the environment, making the building itself a medium of communication between the men and nature.
△ Vertical symmetry between the people and the space.
△ The traversable inner corridor provides a layered look through multiple screens.
This design breaks the barriers between internal and external spaces through the intervention of the “Screen”, allowing these joints to penetrate deep into the space and also extend to the external environment at the same time. The two transparent glass bodies with internal use space are originally independent of each other. It is because of the existence of joints that the centripetal force generated by them firmly pulls the two together, establishing a dialogue between spaces and spaces.
On the other hand, the “Screen” are no longer limited to the perimeter of the building, but extend more parts beyond the limitation and go beyond the boundaries of the building, opening to the outdoor to extend and coexist with the nature, symbiotically. This also establishes the connection between the internal space and the external natural environment. Truly and ingeniously the “Screen” connects the space, architecture, people, and environment to jointly present to the public a novelty of aesthetic and humanistic landscape.
The “Screen” as the Capturer
Among the traditional screens, the “Screen” has relatively stronger spatial control. It defines space and location, and controls our human perception. In the natural context, the “Screen Pavilion” can well capture and anchor people’s perception of the space: on the one hand, it is the physical perception that the structure of the “Screen” can be clearly perceived by the bypassing human body. The positive sphere in the middle of the screen is tangent to the union of four screens, and the position of the negative shape of the sphere is accurately defined, so that the observer’s visual center is always gravitated towards the center of the sphere. This means, say a person of five feet tall will form a stable vertical symmetry at eye height. In this way, the precision of architectural scale and human perception scale is established, just like the vertical symmetry that Mies van der Rohe established in the Barcelona Pavilion. Through scale control, a vertical symmetry is formed, which is precisely related to the scale of the human body.
△ Long horizontal scroll unfolded from the inside.
△ Observe the stone arch bridge and gallery pavilion in the distance through the square aperture of the screen.
△ Through the aperture of the screen, people’s sight can travel through multiple dimensions of space.
The Transparency of the “Screen”
We define the sense of place of the building through the simple materials of the ceiling and the ground. On the façade, it focuses on the use of glass and translucent rattan mesh panels to define the distinctive gray levels of the space. At the same time, the transparency of this material also points to the transparency of time, presenting the most poetic aspect of the material itself. The translucency of this rattan material makes it completely different in perception under backlight and forward light environments. Due to the east-west orientation of the building itself, light the intervention can almost miraculously present different internal space states at different times and angles, giving the building a sense of time. The two materials with different permeability also make people present a rich and comfortable “being in but out there” environment under the double cover of the roof and the screen. The screen also provides a good sense of internal privacy and security people would love for.
△ The crisscross and interlock relationship between the screens creates the three-dimensional and spatial compartments.
The uniqueness of the “Screen”
From the perspective of architectural space, a new abstract interpretation of the traditional elements of screens is a rather creative design. The abstract transformation also explores the possibility of building as an installation of the screens aligned in a natural field. An open public environment is built, which has the multiplicity of views and spatial complexity like Chinese gardens, but the openness is well-designed so the transparency of the building can better penetrate into the nature.
