Like the notion of cultivating Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, and sauvignon blanc grapes in China, Qingyun Ma’s design of GateHall grafts Western concepts onto local Asian roots. This latest addition to the architect’s Jade Valley Winery, outside of Xi’an, in the center of the country, is a hybrid that’s simultaneously familiar and odd. A multipurpose three-story building, which includes an art gallery as well as dining and guest rooms, shares a lineage with nearby farmhouses in its simple rectangular footprint, poured-concrete frame, and river-stone cladding. But the 21,000-square-foot building has been warped by foreign influences—so much so that one facade, which is almost completely glazed, has a gabled roof, broken by a fractal-inspired dormer, an elevation with no true precedent in Chinese or imported architecture. Even seemingly indigenous elements become subverted by alien concepts, including an entry court with stone walls nearly 20 feet high, defying local tradition in their dimensions.
Since Ma, principal of MADA s.p.a.m., started making French-style wines in 2000 in the foothills of the Qinling Mountains, this Chinese-born architect—who was dean at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture from 2007 to 2017—has been building his winery as an experiment in cultural and architectural cross-fertilization. He started with a much acclaimed stone-and-bamboo house for his father and went on to create a series of structures for making and tasting wine, as well as mini-hotels in new and renovated buildings.
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