Earthen Architecture and Culture (Xi'an) Research Center

It is composed of two immediately adjacent volumes of differing heights: The lower southern volume is a single-story, forming a large, undivided space, while the taller northern volume spans two stories, incorporating a 9-meter-high double-height space at its junction with the lower volume.

The internal spatial organization is driven by functional requirements, divided into three zones: exhibition, experimentation, and office.

the exhibition space, occupying the entire southern volume on the ground floor, is designed to be regularly open to the public, acting as a deliberate indoor extension of the neighborhood's public realm.

The relatively private experimentation and office spaces are distributed across the ground and upper levels of the northern volume.

Within this double-height boundary space, we introduced two new volumes on the upper level: One is a meeting room and an open corridor facing the void.

The other is a small office positioned at the northern edge of the double-height space, separating the public zone from the open office area.

This design not only blurs the boundaries between public and private, but also enriches the spatial experience of this interface.

Ultimately, all spatial experiences rely on the tangible reality of materials, requiring the design to confront specific practical issues.

Furthermore, anticipating unpredictable construction quality, we were highly vigilant from the outset about any details or techniques that couldn't guarantee a basic finish.

This meant construction details had to be as simple and direct as possible, utilizing conventional methods.

Take the added meeting room floor slab, for example: we chose to construct it using a structural steel-ribbed brick vault (Catalan vault).

Ten H-shaped steel beams (120x85mm), spaced 630mm apart, formed the skeleton, with red bricks laid in vaults between them, topped with a concrete infill.

We decisively omitted any elements deemed non-essential. This restraint allowed the design to focus more intently on honestly expressing the materials and construction. Though perhaps appearing clumsy and laborious, it was a natural balance of logic and intuition. Materials, as physical things, express themselves, and when "crafting" is done appropriately, a raw power and poetry emerge. As architect Liu Jiakun observed, "Architecture is about manipulating matter until the spirit emerges from it.