Output details

Chengdu Museum

The focus of the work of our practice is concerned with ‘context’ and the genius loci of place. Our work builds upon our experiences as design assistants within the office of James Stirling back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

As a practice we have been influenced by the ideas first expounded by Ken Frampton in his book ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance’ where he recalls Paul Ricoeur’s “how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization”. According to Frampton’s proposal,

critical regionalism should adopt modern architecture, critically, for its universal progressive qualities but at the same time value should be placed on the geographical context of the building.

Our Project for the new City Museum in Chengdu presented us with all these challenges and issues in an unfamiliar context and culture.

The issues surrounding of this project relate both to the extraordinary economic growth of China and its own development and rediscovery of its cultural past and how we can help contribute to their cultural future.

We are not simply working with the physical context of site and place, we are actively engaged with the process by which China delivers its cultural policy and locally how this translates into a building with regional cultural and contextual meaning and relevance.

The other major issue which is raised in this project is the Chinese National policy direcive that Western Architects must be part of the conceptual design all Natioanally significant buildings. This has had the consequence that design and construction of projects in China have been entirely separated and consequently the resoloution of bulidings are very poor

interpretations of the original design intent.