With thousands of artists in the area busily forging famous (and obscure) paintings, Dafen is an intriguing place for an art museum. A “village” within the city of Shenzhen, it features streets and alleys packed with studios producing counterfeit paintings, many of which are bought to decorate hotel rooms in the United States and elsewhere, To help upgrade the neighborhood and attract tourists, the local government help an invited competition for the museum and selected Urbanus Architecture & Design, a Chinese firm with offices in Shenzhen and Beijing, to design the building.
Urbanus’ proposal went beyond the design of a building to include a program of uses for the institution itself. “A typical art museum would be out place,” says Yan Meng, one of three partners at Urbanus. Less a ‘museum’ in the traditional sense, and more a mixed-use arts center, the project responds to both the topography and unique cultural setting of its urban environment. Urbanus designed a three-story building, in which each floor has a different function. The ground floor, which is open to an adjacent plaza, provides areas for local artists to sell their paintings and an auditorium for public events. On Level 2, the architects designed a collection of white-box galleries with 8,000 square meters of space for exhibitions. On the top level, they created a series of indoor workshops and studios and outdoor community spaces that mimic the intricate grid pattern of Dafen village; rising up between the open courtyards here are boxy skylights that bring daylight to the exhibition spaces below “We made a sandwich,” notes Yan, who conceived the project not just as a cultural facility, but as an extension of the site’s unique topography.
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