Ennead Presents Designs for the Wuxi Garden Weave Art Museum in China

Nearly a decade later, New York-based vibrant Shanghai-based Ennead Architects has unveiled the winning design for a major arts and culture center in Wuxi, a historic port city of about 5 million people. The densely populated province of Jiangsu in eastern China.
Like the firm’s design for the new Milwaukee Public Museum, the future Wuxi Art Museum, located in the Shangxianhe Wetland Park on the shores of the city’s lake, is based directly on regional geology shaped by the hands of nature. In the case of the Wuxi Art Museum, the vast multi-volume complex pays homage to Gongshi stone, or Taihu stone, or Literary stone, a precious limestone commonly used in traditional Chinese garden design that originated near Taihu Lake. . Taihu Lake). Large freshwater lakes are one of the iconic natural features of Wuxi and the surrounding provinces, including Nanjing, Suzhou, Changzhou and Xuzhou. The southeast of Shanghai borders the province.
The Wuxi Art Museum, maintained by the Wuxi Municipal Government, formerly known as the Wuxi Institute of Painting and Calligraphy, was founded in 1979 and is currently located in the Chunan District of the city.
Ennead worked closely with Dutch landscape architecture firm West 8 to create a new museum entirely immersed in the province’s rich wetland landscape, resulting in “a contemplative and complex spatial structure, both spiritually captivating and quiet, sitting like a meditative thing in a more wide natural space. installation,” the company said in a statement.
“The new art museum will be a symbol of Wuxi’s past, present and future, so it was important to us that its design stand out from Garden City’s cultural history and subtly integrate art, landscape, and museum experiences,” Brian H. Enneada explains Masuda, Deputy Director Architects company.
Masuda went on to note in a statement that the campus’ open, flowing design is meant to “clearly convey the museum’s desire to be a welcoming and accessible public space in Wuxi that strengthens the community through the appreciation of artistic creations.”
Linking a series of sculptural gardens, courtyards and plazas, a “curated” walkway runs through lush landscaped gardens, which will also feature an outdoor amphitheater for special performances and film screenings.
“Intertwined with the porous museum experience of courtyards, galleries, thresholds, open-air ceilings and terraces, architecture and landscape share a common language that enhances the museum experience from within,” explained creative director Daniel Vasini. “Inspired by the ecology of the Wuxi wetlands and the regional tradition of water and canal management, we asked ourselves how we can bring human experience into this rich heritage and reintegrate the museum into the environment,” said the directors of West 8 in a statement. With the symbiosis of landscape and architecture expanding and contracting, the experience series invites visitors to explore and immerse themselves in the sculpture garden’s multi-level system.”
Like West 8′s sinuous, environmentally-inspired exterior spaces, including the Wuxi Art Park, the interior of the museum’s roughly 323,000-square-foot campus is seen as “a sequence of endless possibilities,” Ennead describes.
“Our vision for the Wuxi Art Museum was to fit it into a larger overall composition, highlighting the landscape inside and outside the museum with subtractive carvings and grooves, while mimicking Lingshi’s natural erosion,” added Ennead designer and partner Thomas J. Wong. . in a statement. “The garden metaphor inspires not only a formal but also an experiential proposal, offering an evolving journey through art and nature through carefully choreographed, where every step reveals something new.”
The overall design emphasis on porosity and reverence extends to the museum’s perforated limestone façade, which allows ample natural light to enter the interior spaces, nodding to the imperfect perforated texture of the arched stone.


Post time: Nov-04-2022