Golden
Arch Design Award
Winner
in
2022
'22
Cuisuba Yi Cultural & Visitor Cente
Designed by
Haobo Wei,Jingson Xie /Westline Studio
Title:
Function:
Location:
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Team Members:
Cuisuba Yi Cultural & Visitor Cente
Cultural Architecture
Dafang County, Guizhou Province, China
Haobo Wei,Jingson Xie /Westline Studio
Yudang Luo, Minghua Ou Yuanping Li
Photo Credits:
Westline Studio
Copyrights:
Westline Studio
The project is one of the visitor reception facilities built by the local government for tourism development and is located in a mythical alpine grassland, the Cuisuba Grassland, a hereditary settlement of the ancient Yi people. The Yi worship the great mountains and their life world is full of rituals.
The design presents an architectural interpretation of the building from a visitor reception to a symbolic, wordless monument, presenting a poetic expression of the spirit of local place under a sustainable projection of human ecology.
The volume of the building resembles a traditional Yi altar, accessed by a ramp full of rituals and establishing a dialogue with the sky through a system of skylights, The spatial model is based on the integration of the 'ritual' structure of the Yi community society with the contemporary parallel functional system; the fragmentary grouping of the symbolic Yi ritual system and the rough concrete workmanship of the old Yi wooden houses are combined to create an anonymous monument of the community on the Genting plateau + a 'consensus history' place structure. "The structure of the place is a helper to anchor the collective memory of the community; the structure of the landscape of "lonely peak + grassland + mountains" achieves a grand and magnificent will of the place, a profound historical inscription and time sharing on the plateau dam... ...
The building is elevated on the ground floor to minimise encroachment on the land and to maintain the continuity of the meadow; the architects have used concrete, metal and glass as the main materials with great restraint; the structure is made of concrete with local sand and gravel as the aggregate, and the construction techniques of the local workers are combined with the use of old timber formwork to create a unique rugged architectural texture that responds to the traditions of the local community.