The Luyeyuan Museum houses a private collection of Buddhist stone sculptures. The overall layout, resembling a traditional Chinese garden, allows visitors to alternately experience the natural and artificial while exploring the museum’s contents. The visitors’ path is a 3-dimensional immersion within the building and the landscape: the entrance itself is series of elevated concrete decks that move rhythmically and diagonally through a dense bamboo and tree-lined canopy. Through their oblique arrangement, the building itself is obscured until one reaches a long and narrow entry ramp that lightly stretches across a serene body of water.
Inverting expectations, the ramp penetrates the 2nd floor of the main museum so that one hovers over the ground floor, cavernous as if
it had been excavated, displaying large-scale Buddhist figurines and wall carvings. In the same way as the landscape is experienced circuitously, visitors circulate the perimeter of a roof courtyard where light filled vitrines containing various Buddha statues punctuate the walls. One is then led down a flight of stairs to the main L-shaped exhibition hall that is subtly subdivided into four niches separated by
vertical gaps of light.
"Liu Jiakun’s buildings follow the traditional narrative structure of exposition: rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Like
a compelling novel, his stories are closely knit structures of various spatial events. However, Liu Jiakun’s narratives rely on a slow development of the exposition.
…
The museum is not visible at all from the entrance to the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum. There is only a path leading through the bamboo trees; garden and path, forest and path, in gentle continuation."
- Kim Seunghoy (Professor, Seoul National University), p.57
Architect
Jiakun Architects (Liu Jiakun)
Design team
Wang Lun, Zhao Ruixiang
Location
Pixian County, Chengdu, Sichuan, China Programme M
Programme
Museum
Building area
PHASEⅠ 1,100m2 PHASEⅡ 1,735m2 PHASE Ⅲ 2,690m2
Design period
Feb. 2001 – July 2002 PHASE Ⅱ·Ⅲ June 2002 &#
Liu Jiakun
Liu Jiakun works across fields, such as architecture, city planning, landscape, interior design, production and installation art since Jiakun Architects founded in 1999. Focusing on social issues and respecting for local contexts and vernacular craftsmanship, he aims to solve contemporary architectural issues with a sense of realism: the approach for each project is inspired by folk wisdom. Looking forward to compatibility between tradition and modernity, he devotes himself to translating the spirit of Chinese culture into to the architectural language. His exploration of suitable techniques in architecture is kept on conducting by his professional works on how to serve the needs of the public. Many projects throw light on reciprocal relations between the daily life in China and the cultural space in the city.
Jiakun's projects had been exhibited at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and the 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. He won several awards including the Honor Prize of the 7th ARCASIA, Chinese Architecture & Art Prize 2003, Architectural Record Magazine China Award, Far East Award in Architecture and Architectural Design Award from Architectural Society of China, and Audi Arts Design Award.
