Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/518559
164 CULTURED "It's historically incredibly sensitive," says the architect. Directly adjacent to a famous hutong, the Guardian Art Center stands a couple blocks away from Beijing's Forbidden City, on the largest remaining plot of land in the political center's vicinity until construction began last year. The complex sits at the intersection of Wangfujing, the city's most famous commercial street, and Wusi Street, a prominent cultural thoroughfare home to the National Art Museum of China. "An auction house is the intersection of commerce and culture, so symbolically, it's a perfect location for the project," says Scheeren. The surrounding neighborhood has been the site of numerous student protests throughout the past century and witnessed many of the key historical turns that transformed imperial China into a modern communist society. The tightly regulated landmark zone had proven too challenging for other architects—over 30 designs have been proposed for the site by Chinese designers, all rejected by the municipal planning bureau. Yet Scheeren was particularly keen on the location's historic character and attendant zoning restrictions: "It's a nice thing after having designed the most explicitly future-oriented project in the city, to show that we can also work in a very different way." The organization of the Guardian Art Center building mirrors the polarities Scheeren sees in the surrounding urban landscape. The eight-story building is split into two stacked sections, organized around an interior courtyard. The first four floors—devoted to auctions, exhibition halls, and cultural programming—are located inside a plinth of intersecting, staggered rectangles that reference the scale and geometry of the nearby hutong. The upper four floors, containing a 120- room luxury hotel, will be encased within a single cuboid mass. Scheeren devised a subtle visual strategy to create visual continuity between the Center's upper mass and the hutongs, which are built of brick, below: "We transferred imprint of the brick onto the upper ring, to make the ring more textured like a filigree and much lighter." As such, the Guardian Art Center acts as a bridge—between urban scales and between its historic and contemporary surroundings. "I think there's a dual precision to the urbanism," says Scheeren. "A somewhat harmonious interlocking of two things that somehow otherwise exist in constant tension." Between his origins in Karlsruhe, his practice in Beijing and his goal to open offices in London and New York, one might say the same for Scheeren himself. "I realized the world was very different than what we were taught in our European shell." —Ole Scheeren PORTRAIT BY BJARNE JONASSON