Cloud Echo
Liu Wei

Painfull beauty from Junichiro Tanizaki's in praise of shadows

Tsutsumi and Associates as Architects

"In the darkness of the innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold leaf of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send fort an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness. In no other setting is gold quite so painfully beautiful. "(From Junichiro Tanizaki's in praise of shadows)

photo_credit Liu Wei
Liu Wei
photo_credit Liu Wei
Liu Wei

A 45m high observation tower stands in a corner of the commercial development area in Foshan City, Guangdong Province. It was decided to renovate the former observation room into a sushi lounge. An amusement park spreads out and a colorfully shining Ferris wheel is spinning in front of Sushi counter. How to create a calm and luxurious space while looking at the gorgeous scenery that symbolizes the consumer society. Based on the above-mentioned sentence of Tanizaki, we created a jet black darkness by composing most of the space with black material, and imagined the gold that emerges by capturing the outdoor light behind it, and we show it as "painful beauty".

photo_credit Liu Wei
Liu Wei
photo_credit Liu Wei
Liu Wei

The black material has a variety of natural cleft stone, Jet burner finish, terrazzo, washout stone, tile, black iron, paint, etc. so that you can feel the change even in the darkness of jet black. Gold leaf like lacquer work is manually painted by craftsmen on a matte emulsion paint base. Only the cypress Sushi counter has a bright saturation, and the reflected light on the table has the effect of making gold dimly emerge from the surrounding darkness.

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