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Architects: Approach Architecture Studio
- Area: 552 m²
- Year: 2017
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Lead Architects: Jingyu Liang, Siyu Ye
Text description provided by the architects. Baoguosi Buddhism Temple is located in a remote mountain area of Sichuan Province. The history of the temple can be traced back to Sui Dynasty (C.E. 581-C.E. 618). The site of Zen Centre was a teahouse, built around 1970’s.
The entire building is situated between the quiet mountains and forests. It tries to hideamong the trees as much as possible, so as not to break the relationship between the old buildings and the forests in themountains. There are some trees in the original site, most of them are preserved or transplanted to form an inner courtyard or landscape, which naturally connects with the site environment. The layout of the small courtyard with the rock garden is preserved from theteahouse. In order to increase the capacity of the original teahouse, the footprint of the new building has been expanded. It also forms a large opening roof terrace for the upper floor’s meditation hall.
Considering the difficulties of the transportation of heave-duty construction machine and materials such as long-span steel beam in the mount area, here we introduced a wooden truss system to the glazed gable roof. The wooden truss system is composed by small laminated bamboo rods, which can be easily assembled by workers without mechanical assistance. The cross section of each bamboo rod is only 2 cm*4 cm, but the strength is strong enough as steel to realizing a large span of more than 12 meters. And the bamboo rods materials are actually from local.
The post-free space provides a unique meditation experience in the traditional Buddhism Temple. It is made for young educated laymen to gather here and learn the basic of Buddhism.
The sky and the forests make people easily feel relaxed when they are in a space close enough to the nature. This traditional Buddhist Temple has brought an unprecedented experience space of meditation.
