China Academy of Arts’ Folk Art Museum by Kengo Kuma

Photographer: Eiichi Kano

The folk art museum stands in the campus of China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. The site was formerly a tea field that formed a hillside. Our point was to design a museum from which the ground below can be felt, by continuing the building’s floors that follow the ups and downs of the slope. Planning is based on geometric division in the units of parallelogram to deal with the intricate topography. Each unit has a small individual roof, so the outlook became like a village that evokes a view of extending tiled roofs. The outer wall is covered with a screen of tiles hung up by stainless wires, and it controls the volume of sunlight coming into the rooms inside. Old tiles for both the screen and the roof came from local houses. Their sizes are all different, and that helps the architecture merge into the ground naturally.

China Academy of Arts

Kengo Kuma & Associates

Structural Design: Konishi Structural Engineers
Facility Design: P.T. Morimura & Associates

Photographer: Eiichi Kano