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Interior Designers: Top Design Architects
- Area: 1150 m²
- Year: 2016
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Photographs:Shuobin Zhou
Text description provided by the architects. The “one or two” art gallery is located in the Wujiagang district of Yichang, Hubei province, it’s the first private art gallery in Yichang and there are many cultural relics with important historical value and lots of celebrity calligraphy, paintings and seals.
The name of the gallery “one or two” comes from the Taoism quote: “The unpleasant things possess eight or nine in ten of our life, but we should always think about the rest one or two.”The owner of the galleryhopes it can express Taoism——the most originalspiritofChinese traditional culture which he believes in all the time. After various trying, the design team know that what they need to do is to translate the Taoism into space language in the simplest way, people who come into the gallery will have their own reading about the space. At last, after the gallery was build up, people found that every space of this gallery can express more than one meaning. Different visitors have different choice and will get different feelings, this condition is just as the Taoism saying goes——“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”
The facade of “one or two” gallery is nearly nothing, the building is just a white box set off by a square of water, a wall and a piece of bamboo forest. Although it seems nothing on the facade, the road on the entrance square paved with dark granites and the bamboo forest designed as corridor give visitors a strong guidance to the entrance. Visitors can go into the gap of the wall and then find a path with bamboo forest which leads people to the gallery.
Going inside the gallery, the bright “water courtyard” will be seen at first. A black mirror pool “float” at the center of the white space, the fishes and the shadow of the tree make the sense of Yin and Yang, dynamic and static. In the middle of the gallery, there is an atrium which can be both indoor and outdoor, pools and platforms made by black bricks are in the four corners of the atrium. The bamboos grow from pools and they are on relative directions but become views of each other.
One wall separated, the north side is a dark black aisle, while the bright white corridor on the south side. The white skylight in the black exhibition room echo the black pool in the white water courtyard space.
The gallery is built up by modern materials and technology, but when people walking in it, they can feel the traditional culture brought by the space made by abstract alley, door, paved path, atrium, corridor, shed and stair.
The architects consider that the real respect to tradition is not to copy the tradition, they abandoned all the symbolic architectural language when they design the gallery. Through the comprehension of the Taoism, the architects put the “Tao” into the modern material and technology and tribute to the Chinese tradition successfully.
