Roadshow art center of Tianfu

The Tianfu Roadshow Art Center, designed by TEKTONN ARCHITECTS (Wang Xiang) and completed in 2022 on 2,592 square metres at the intersection of East Hupan Road and North Luxikou Road in the Shuangliu District of Chengdu, sits on the shore of Xinglong Lake in the core of the Tianfu New Area. As a cultural, artistic and scientific-innovation window for the new district, and because of its lakeside position and long visual distance across the water, the building is required to hold a systematic spatial, formal and contextual logic. The design dissolves the centre into the lakeside park: on the city side, the building takes a modest, supporting posture and opens a public slope for visitors to climb and look out, while on the lake side it coils into a varied, hospitable waterfront. Its simple mass and rough materiality read from afar as a moment when a lake creature has broken the surface and been frozen in mid-leap. The facade imitates the rough rock of the lakeshore, expressed as a wave-like grille that wraps the outside as a semi-transparent skin; the grille reduces direct sun by day and produces a richly changing architectural face by night. Its permeability makes exterior and interior continuous, and the structure, ceiling and moving light produce a graduated sequence that points strongly toward the lake, while the two-kilometre depth of the lake itself becomes the civic-scale background of the interior. The result is a column-free, waterside hall of rare spatial character, offering citizens an alternative waterfront experience. Structural engineering by i-Structure, landscape by Chen Hongyu of China Southwest Architectural Design and Research Institute, and photography by Exist Architecture and Haoli complete a project that treats the lake itself as the building's principal material.