Built on the doorstep of Beijing’s historic Forbidden City, the Guardian Art Center is a new hybrid cultural institution that embodies the city’s traditional urban fabric and thriving metropolitan energy. The world’s first ever custom-built auction house, it represents a new typology of a hybrid arts institution located in the heart of Beijing. Offering museum quality galleries and state of the art conservation facilities, the building is also a community resource with restaurants, a hotel, flexible event spaces, and integrated public transport infrastructure.
Constructed at the intersection of Wangfujing, Beijing’s most famous shopping street, and WusiDajie, the site where China’s New Cultural Movement originated after the Qing Dynasty, the Guardian Art Center inhabits the space between culture and commerce in a synthesis of Beijing’s heritage and future.
The design carefully inscribes the building into its surrounding context, in a sensitive architectural interpretation that fuses history and tradition with a contemporary vision for the future of a cultural art space. The ‘pixelated’ volumes of the lower portion of the building subtly refer to the adjacent historic urban fabric, echoing the grain, color and intricate scale of Beijing’s hutongs. The upper portion of the building responds to the larger scale of the surrounding contemporary city in the form of a floating ‘ring’ that creates an inner courtyard to the building and further resonates with the prevalent typology of the courtyard houses in Beijing.
The building’s facades take on a specific role in its cultural expression and Chinese integration: materiality, color, and texture establish abstract and subtle correspondence with Chinese symbols and meaning. The grey stone-like pixels of the lower portion of the building are perforated by several thousand circular openings – generated by projecting one of China’s most important historic landscape paintings, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, onto its facades and thereby creating a subtle light filter through an abstracted landscape silhouette.
At the center of the building, a 1,700 square meter column-free exhibition space allows for maximum flexibility and versatility, while expansive exhibition areas on the second floor further extend the museum. Two large auction/exhibition halls in the basement provide a more specific and formal setting, completing the typological variety of spaces. The surrounding matrix of smaller, interconnected rooms of the architectural pixels accommodates support functions and liberates the building’s central halls from secondary obligations.
The building is, at its core, a machine for exhibitions and events. The two main column-free spaces are stacked in the center of its footprint and enable a multitude of uses – simple, yet versatile ceiling and floor mechanisms provide easy adaptability. These two spaces create a sectional courtyard within the building at the scale of a hangar – a space so large that virtually anything can happen. They stage and accommodate auctions/exhibitions throughout the seasonal auction calendar, but for most of the year expand the cultural programming into special exhibitions, symposiums, and events of diverse nature – a public/private museum with a cultural and educational mission.
