A curving lattice of concrete beams rests the upper storey of Rizhao Community Art Center on three corners, so ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office can open the ground floor to a Shandong hillside on every side.
Rizhao lies on the Yellow Sea coast of Shandong, and in Egret Bay, the resort town also known as Bailuwan, public buildings and residential districts are laid out in one development plan. ZAO's community art centre sits on the public side of that plan and serves the residential area around it. The studio gives it two jobs: bring art to the people who live nearby, and give the area public space. The second job decides the section. Public space takes the middle level of the building, with the art below it and the courtyards above.
The plot sits on a slope with a small lake close by, and the building answers the hill with a curved form of its own, worked into the existing topography. Its frame, a lattice of curving concrete beams, is carried at three corners only, where three cores take the load and the stairs. The facade is cast on site as double-layer concrete with insulation, left fair-faced, its surface carrying the grain of wood. Where the upper structure meets the lower one, ZAO leaves a narrow slit. It makes plain that the building comes in two pieces, and inside the cast-concrete stairwell it lets in a line of green from the lawn.
Between the two parts lies the ground floor, shaped in three dimensions and cut open on every side by lenticular openings through which it runs out into the gently sloping lawn. ZAO calls it “a new public landscape formed within the building”, and it is meant to be crossed as much as entered. To the north-east it opens to the lake and takes in an existing golf course; from the other directions, footbridges tie it to the existing roads. No side is the front. The space hosts outdoor cinema, theatre and cultural events for residents and visitors alike, and between the enclosed cores its light, dimensions and shape keep changing as one moves through.
Upstairs the logic reverses. The upper storey shuts itself off from its surroundings, and the concrete structure divides it into trapezoidal courtyards and smaller rooms for community use, an interior landscape laid out like a labyrinth. The courtyards reach for the inwardness of the classical Chinese garden, each space holding its own relation to nature. The landscape itself returns only on the accessible roof, as a view.
The art goes underground. The exhibition level is buried beneath the grass slope and entered down a gentle concrete incline set into the lawn; its rooms are divided only by the structural elements the building needs, and the sculptural ceiling over the gallery traces the contours the site already had. ZAO credits the effect to rooms that open and close in turn, and to “the concentration that results from the delimiting and opening-up of perspectives”. Put plainly, the hill is met four ways: from underneath it, out in the open, from within a storey closed against it, and from the roof, looking back over it. For a residential area, that is a generous amount of landscape to hold in common.
