PES Architects Reveal Contemporary Culture and Art Centre in China ⇒ The Helsinki and Shanghai-based firm PES-Architects have completed their newest project, the Strait Culture and Art Centre in Fuzhou, China. The firm used custom-developed ceramic tiles and louvres to create the curving lines of the building, arranging the five swooping buildings that make up the centre to unfurl like the overlapping petals of a jasmine flower – the symbol of Fuzhou.

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PES-Architects’ design of the Fuzhou Strait Culture and Art Centre takes inspiration from the petals of jasmine blossom, a floral symbol of the city. Each of the five ‘petals’ contain a different program: a 1,600-seat opera house; a 1,000-seat concert hall; a 700-seat a multi-functional theatre; an exhibition gallery; and a cinema centre. These venues are linked by a cultural concourse and a large roof terrace with public services and commercial and leisure facilities.

“Dividing the large complex into smaller units gives the centre a more human scale and makes it easy for users to navigate both indoors and outdoors,’ explains Pekka Salminen, founder of PES-Architects. ‘Each building has a core area — a semi-public, curved gallery that follows the curvature of the main façade — that integrates the public interior space with the landscape of the jasmine gardens around the building and further with the Mahangzhou Island natural reserve in front of the centre.”

The architects worked with Taiwanese ceramic artist Samuel Hsuan-yu Shih to design the interior for the two main auditoriums, with all façades clad with white ceramic tiles and louvers. The interior surfaces of the opera hall and concert hall are clad with two types of topographical ceramic panels: an engraved panel and a mosaic tile panel. Both are adaptable to the topographical surfaces that are required to achieve high quality acoustics, as well as the visual language of the design.

Bamboo was used to clad the theatre hall, with solid blocks of bamboo made using a computer-controlled cutting machine to create the ideal acoustics. A flexible cable net ceiling in the roof can accommodate different lighting rigs. Each of the art buildings has a core area formed of a public gallery that curves to match the shape of the facade. In the concourse lobby entrance, the lifts and ventilation shafts are housed in “mushroom columns” that curve to meet the ceiling like the gills on fungi. Blossom-shaped skylights in the roof allow daylight to filter through.

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Source: Design Boom