-> Ai Qing Poetry Culture Center
Advisor: Thom Mayne.
Ai Qing’s poetry is a journey about nature and beauty as well as his humanity, a consistent internal conflict that he was able to accept and share. This provoked the idea of designing an architecture that could manifest both his public legacy and his private life: his intimate thoughts, feelings and actions. Not just the ‘what’ but the ‘why’. An architecture with multiple faces and multiple readings. Changing environments that are not fixed in time but are part of a journey.
The combinatory studies gave form to this idea through the interaction between paths and a mound. The main urban sequence takes people across a bridge and through the building without having to enter it. This ends in a landscape ‘cut’ that separates the theater from its foyer, private from public.