Shanhai Art Museum

The Shanhai Art Museum occupies an important public building within Cuifeng Ecological Park west of Kunming. Its name, mountain and sea, refers both to its position rising above the city on a ridge and to its location at the northern end of the Dianchi Lake watershed, where city, water and mountains all enter the view. The strong site character shapes the art space. The site is about a half-hour drive from the foot of the hill; arriving, visitors see stone forests winding out and the mountain sliced into upper and lower terraces with more than ten meters of dramatic, poetic height difference. Earlier scholars built platforms, tea houses, viewing pavilions, corridors and pools from base to summit; though now derelict, connecting them reveals a constellation of accumulated human understanding. The architects abandoned the idea of placing the museum on a flat terrace and instead dispersed its spaces along the terrain to dance with the stone forest, forming a settlement of multiple relationships suited to viewing, wandering and reflecting. Along the mountainside, distant, middle and near views suggest orientations; the fragmented museum spaces nestle on an infinity-shaped loop, either parallel or sequential. Framed views at each point overlap exhibition and environment, realizing the atmosphere of scooping a ladle of Dianchi and placing it halfway up the hill.