Golden A' Design Award Winner 2020
Emerging from traditions of contemplative architecture that seek harmony between constructed form and natural landscape, Qun Wen's Shanxiao Sales Pavilion Sales Office represents a distinguished achievement in contemporary spatial design that merits careful consideration for its synthesis of geometric precision and organic expressiveness. The work appears to engage with longstanding East Asian architectural philosophies wherein built environments function as frames for experiencing nature rather than barriers against it, a principle manifest here through the deployment of an extensive reflecting pool that visually doubles the pavilion while connecting earth to sky through liquid mirror. The technical accomplishment evidenced in this composition demonstrates sophisticated understanding of structural glazing systems, allowing the transparent glass envelope to achieve remarkable visual lightness while containing the dramatic sculptural masses within. These interior white forms, with their horizontal stratification suggesting geological strata or clouds captured in material form, introduce biomorphic qualities that soften the orthogonal rigor of the containing volume, creating productive dialogue between rational and intuitive formal languages. The chromatic restraint exercised throughout, limiting the palette to whites, grays, and the borrowed colors of landscape and sky, suggests confidence in spatial and formal composition rather than reliance upon chromatic drama. One might observe how the stillness of the water surface becomes essential to the architectural experience, transforming a single building into an doubled image that speaks to themes of reflection, contemplation, and the fluid boundary between reality and representation. The work invites viewers to consider how architecture might function as apparatus for heightened perception, framing moments of visual poetry within the flow of daily commercial activity.
The designer aimed for visitors to experience the artistic conception of ‘hidden in nature.’ the entire project has two parts, the sales office and the commercial area. the sales office is a smaller part of the building, but is executed with an exquisite and delicate aesthetic. it is naturally engraved and hidden in nature, thus highlighting the concept of ‘seclusion’.