CHEGS Campus Canteen, Baoding, China - Underneath the Skin

摘要

Light and Heavy It is always fascinating to understand the underlying contextual conditions of a project and thus the starting point for any design decision. Often the peculiarities of a plot become the starting point, as in the case of the canteen building in Baoding, where the character and form of the building are derived from its location. The building is located in a four-sided enclosed campus in the center of Baoding City in Northern China. Relatively tall buildings dominate the courtyard; on the north side, a residential building is located a short distance away, and on the south side, the main building of the Institute campus with its ten floors overlooks the canteen building. The local City Planning Authority prescribed that the footprint of the new building had to match the one of an old warehouse which had previously occupied the site. Together with the specification of the number of floors, the new construction volume was directly derived into a cubic form sitting on its base of 13 × 33 m. The difficulty for the architect was to establish a strong presence for the building in such an environment despite its fixed volume. The client, a hydro-geological research institute, is engaged on a day-to-day basis with the discovery, description and codification of stone types and rock aquifers. This provided an inspiration to make use of the materiality and solidity of stone in order to create a building that has a heavy and monolithic quality from afar, while simultaneously communicating lightness and differentiation from up close. This ambiguity is possible with the help of several design decisions. First, the outer wall is composed of two layers: the (inner) spatial boundary is established by floor to ceiling glass elements, while on the outside, the stone facade is visibly perforated by gradually opening butt joints, which impart a light appearance to the heavy stone facade. The location of the largest hole formats is based on the eye level and thus operates at the human scale. The facade perforation is supplemented by selected floor to ceiling glass openings that mark the three main entrances, namely the two entrances of the canteen and the ground floor access of the multi-purpose space. At the building's base, the stone wall rests on a 50 cm high C-channel steel profile, providing a shadow gap which further suggests lightness. In addition, it also clearly communicates that the stone wall - built of yellow, bush hammered granite blocks from a local quarry - is a self-supporting and solid wall, though not the primary structure of the building.