LIANZHOU MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY | Lianzhou, Qingyuan, Guangdong, China | 2017

Architects: O-office Architects 
Client: Lianzhou Museum of Photography
General Contractor: Lianzhou Construction
Structural Engineers: Wan Shuqi
VI Design: another design
Photographers: Chaos Z, Chen Xiaotie

In 2005, an annual art event for contemporary photography was launched in Lianzhou by both Chinese and French art curators. The art event soon gained domestic and international recognition. The idea of building a permanent museum to house professional photographic exhibition, archives and education functions surfaced in 2012. The new museum was expected to become the old city’s social and economic regenerator, a place that would unite contemporary arts and the local street life.

The museum was chosen to be built on a small vacant sugar mill in the old city center. It contains two parts, a three-story original warehouse, transformed to the permanent exhibition halls and stockrooms, enclosed by a U-shape new building which houses 4 exhibition halls of different sizes, a library, a conference hall and offices. Exhibition hall volumes, inter-connected by open hallways and staircases, are hung over the ground level to leave open spaces for public event and informal activities. The continuous flow of open space connects the front street and the backside alley and makes the museum an organic part of the neighborhood.

The whole new museum compound is under the shelter of a folded structural roof-façade canopy. It is a symbol of the local traditional ancestral temple. The all sheltered open spaces plus the transparency in-between the exhibition boxes are displaying a strong publicity. The architecture creates a unique journey experience of superposition of urban sceneries and contemporary visual arts. The outdoor theater at the V-shaped roof on top of the main exhibition hall is the peak of the journey experience. Old pottery tiles, bricks and wood windows collected from the demolished buildings have been carefully maintained and re-constructed to the new building. By collaboration with local craftsmen, all those recycled materials, mixed with natural local schist, have been innovatively integrated to the new construction. The new museum thus constructed a continuous spatial and material narrative from the city and the old street, creating a new Lianzhou aesthetic in both archaeological and modernological sense.