Qingdao Ma Shanyue empty auditorium

The Yuedao (Moon-Sky) Chapel at Cangshan Mountain in Qingdao, designed by BUZZ/Zhuang Ziyu Studio, is a 770.91-square-metre ceremonial building completed in 2021 that is at once respectful of the past and open to the future, hosting both religious and secular experiences. The programme is split between a half-sunken lower level embedded in the hillside and linked to the entry plaza and garden, and an upper sanctuary that rises above the landscape, an interplay of hidden and revealed. In conceiving the exterior, the designers abstracted hundreds of vernacular chapel elevations into a series of stacked, sliced volumes that satisfy the intuitive recognition of a chapel while remaining strictly modern; the building's appearance shifts with the observer's angle. The extracted prototype retains a belfry with spire and rose window, layered recessed arches and a basilican plan, but most ornament is abstracted away in order to foreground divinity and ritual. The chapel is oriented due east-west and placed at the centre of the site, with grade changes separating an eastern plaza from a western sloped garden and an artificial lake. The interior, by contrast, is a soft, flowing cavity, evoking the human sense of safety first experienced in caves and later projected onto sacred sites such as Lascaux or Hira. Sixty 5-centimetre-thick slices of aluminium (outside) and GRG (inside) run longitudinally, leaving 40-centimetre gaps through which light enters, bounces and falls evenly across the space; as the sun moves, direct and indirect light patches overlap into a diffuse halo. The structure uses eleven main portal frames and 110 secondary frames: main frames define the exterior, secondary frames, assisted by keels, carve out the interior cave, producing a hard-outside, soft-inside relationship. Primary beams tie the frames together and trace the longitudinal silhouette; secondary beams are deliberately offset to stiffen the box and double as the facade keel. The result is a building that is abstract and contemporary in its aesthetic, yet recognisably a chapel, and that can host a range of future uses.