China’s Shunchang Museum by the UAD

Shunchang Museum is located in a county that features a unique location. For this project, the architects from The Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University Co., Ltd. (UAD) studied the internal connection between the site and the city, balanced the local context with metaphorical creation, and worked to let the building integrate into local citizens’ daily life and carry the memory of those who are residing afar from their hometown.

The museum is not merely a space that collects and displays exhibits; for the city where it sits, the museum itself is an exhibit, platform and symbol. It carries the nostalgic sentiments of local people, and interprets the past and future of local culture.

The project is located in Shunchang County, Nanping City in Fujian Province. Shunchang is surrounded by mountains, with the Futun Stream meandering through. The museum is sited in a core urban area, with its south side facing Longshan Mountain across a road and overlooking the Monument to People’s Heroes in the distance, and the north side adjoining a waterfront walking trail along Futun Stream. 

In line with the long, linear plot sited between mountains and water, its architectural form ensures connectivity between human flows and the walking trail along the stream, and the surrounding natural landscape. Taking the architecture as a medium, the design team constructed a “traversable urban garden”, which opens to the city in multiple dimensions and connects the mountains and stream.

Considering that the project’s site is a key node of the slow-traffic system along the stream, the architects lifted the ground floor of the building to form a large transitional space, to accommodate a large volume of human flow and extends to the bank of Futun Stream.

This area creates an “urban living room”, which blends into the urban setting. This place is enlivened by skateboarding boys, buskers and dancing groups. It provides a venue for the citizens’ daily life activities and cultural events, and in turn is enriched by the citizens.

The design team took the “urban living room” as the starting point of the spatial sequence, before planning the main entrances of the museum and the urban planning exhibition centre, and meanwhile considered the possibility for the independent use of the temporary exhibition hall and the auditorium. The visiting routes of the museum and the urban planning exhibition centre are centred on their comprehensive halls respectively, linking up a visiting circulation route.

The museum’s exhibition halls from the first to third storeys are connected by the comprehensive hall in combination with stairs. The urban planning exhibition centre is centered on the city models area, and is designed with a ramp to guide the visiting route and link the exhibition functions on the first and second storeys.

The connecting space between the museum and the urban planning exhibition centre is a cultural and book bar. The ramp spirals upwards and extends to the rooftop terrace, which connects with the riverside walking trail and helps integrate the building’s interior circulation route into the city. Through big steps, the riverside walking path connects and extends to the building’s rooftop, forming an urban terrace that provides a panoramic view of the mountainous county.

An existing big tree on the site is preserved and moved to the centre of the “urban living room”, to absorb sunshine and create a visual highlight in the space while enhancing a sense of affinity for the architecture. The big tree is a symbol of the site’s memory. While the external environment injects new vitality into urban life and the presence of the new architecture enriches the citizens’ activities, the giant tree is a witness that carries stories of the small county both in the past and future.

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