Zaishui Art Museum

By Philip Jodidio - 2 May 2024

The city of Rizhao is located 157 km southwest of Qingdao in Shandong Province. It is a city of about three million people set on the Yellow Sea in north-eastern China. Japanese architect Junya Ishigami has recently completed the Zaishui Art Museum there, built in an artificial lake near the Chaohe River. Intended also as a visitor center for the neighboring Bailuwan development area, this very unusual structure is approximately 1-km long.

“I had the idea of erecting a structure atop the lake, with the goal of creating an environment where people pass through this structure to cross the lake and naturally arrive at the development zone”, explains Ishigami. With a total area approaching 20,000 sq. m, the structure varies between 1,2 and 5 m in height and is between 4,8 and 20 m wide. “In some places, the soft curve of the roof hangs low”, says Ishigami, “contiguous with the lake surface and mountain slopes behind, and in others, it turns toward the sky, opening up generously and merging the interior of the building into the landscape outside”.

The museum is set on 300 columns that were driven into the lake which is just 2-m deep. The design intentionally engages the landscape with its full-height glazing, but also with openings at the lower edge of the glass that allow the water of the lake to enter the building. These water-level openings as well as operable glazing allow for natural ventilation and mitigation of heat-induced structural expansion. “The water enters and fills the interior”, says the architect, “to make the floor emerge like a sandbank. A landscape at the same scale as the exterior scenery appears inside the building, generating a new external environment inside the architecture. Visitors experience the exterior landscape newly manifested in the interior space as if they are strolling along the shoreline”.
A meadering concrete walkway set 10 cm above the...