Location: Hefei, China

Design Team: TJAD + Shanghai Daochen Architects (DCA)

Area: 9,314 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Qingshan Wu

Design Features: The Art Museum of AHUA stands beside the lake at the south-eastern edge of the university campus in Hefei, close to the School of Fine Arts. A professional museum often depends on opaque walls, artificial lighting and uninterrupted display surfaces to create a controlled “black box”. Here, that enclosure conflicts with the openness of daily teaching, student exchange and an exceptional lakeside setting. The design turns this tension into the starting point for its spatial organisation.

Two storeys above ground and a basement integrated with a sunken court accommodate the programme. Galleries that might normally form one large block are divided into separate units and reassembled through overlap, linear connection and angular offset, reducing the visual weight of roughly 9,000 square metres beside the lake. Black mono-pitched roofs, white walls and timber screens create a contemporary “art settlement” that abstracts the layered roofscape of Huizhou villages.

An exact geometric system underpins the apparently free plan. Building volumes, courts, skylights and stairs follow equilateral triangles with four-metre sides, so walls turn repeatedly at 60 degrees without becoming arbitrary. The central parallelogram-shaped lobby is directed by a 22-metre inclined steel beam; at its end, two walls meet at 60 degrees to frame a view and use reverse perspective to amplify spatial depth.

The central court is encircled by galleries of different sizes, while themed courts with water, trees and rockwork are inserted between them to create a recurring gallery–courtyard–gallery sequence. On the ground floor, detached wall planes open circulation and views toward the campus; above, continuous walls gather the galleries into a more introverted whole. Each wall can serve as structure, display surface, spatial instrument and a concealed cavity for building services.

Stepped outdoor exhibition areas extend the upper-level route to a broad roof terrace. From there, the lake, courts, pitched roofs and wider campus are framed at a new height. The museum therefore operates not only as a container for exhibitions but as a three-dimensional promenade, translating the layered character of a Huizhou settlement and the rhythm of a garden walk into a contemporary cultural building.

Design Team: Founded in 1958 and headquartered in Shanghai, Tongji Architectural Design (Group) Co., Ltd. (TJAD) is a large multidisciplinary design and consultancy practice shaped by Tongji University’s academic tradition. Its work brings together architecture, planning, landscape, interiors, structures, building services and engineering consultancy across cultural, educational, civic and complex urban projects.

TJAD treats design, engineering and research as a continuous process. Architectural ideas are developed through structural, environmental, construction and long-term operational requirements rather than as isolated formal gestures. At the Art Museum of AHUA, this approach allows a precise geometric grid to support an open network of galleries, courtyards, roofs and lakeside spaces.

Joint Design Team: Shanghai Daochen Architects (DCA) was established in 2008 and is led by Chen Qiang, Chen Jianru, Fu Na and Zheng Yingyu. The studio combines an international outlook with close attention to contemporary conditions in China, using architecture to engage regional identity and the character of its time while pursuing originality, artistic clarity and environmental responsibility.

Chen Qiang served as lead architect for this project, with Chen Jianru, Chen Jie, Ye Wen, Bai Qingtao and Zhou Mingxu on the design team; Jin Gang, Li Xi, Zhou You, Xu Zhizhen, Wang Qing and Shen Jiayu formed the engineering team. The joint practice translates the cultural memory of Huizhou settlements into a buildable geometric order, carrying the reference beyond roof form and into the organisation of walls, courts, galleries and visitor movement.