Kengo Kuma’s Hangzhou Interventions: Weaving Landscape, Memory, and New Life
Serving as the main city for many of China’s largest technology companies, Hangzhou is one of China’s largest metropolises, yet it can also be seen as a tranquil city, filled with gardens, lakes and canals. Yet with its deep history comes old architecture, and in this post, we look at 2 of Kengo Kuma’s adaptive reuse projects: China Academy of Art’s Folk Art Museum and Hangzhou Xiaohe Park.
The Old Site(s) & Context
Folk Art Museum, China Academy of Art, Xiangshan
For the Folk Art Museum, the site is located in the hilly area of Xiangshan. Topographically, as it was formerly a tea field, the land has gentle slopes, undulating terrain, forested patches and views towards other tea gardens. More interesting however is the area's deep tea growing culture, vernacular architecture and local homes. The Museum adapted by Kuma is right across from another campus designed by Wang Shu, one of China’s leading architects and the first Chinese to win the renowned Pritzker prize.
Hangzhou Xiaohe Park (former Xiaohe Oil Factory)
Located on the banks of the Grand Canal, a UNESCO-heritage site, the site was formerly an oil factory that was abandoned for decades. When Kuma first visited the site, the abandoned industrial use left behind rusting warehouses, oil tanks, slabs and a tension between industrialization and nature that the site brought. With the city’s population and tourism boom, the government wanted to make this piece of land into a public park. Kuma and his practice eventually won the competition in 2020, converting the old factory into a multiuse public park while preserving much of its industrial past.
Kuma Design Philosophy
Kengo Kuma is best known for his desire to seek balance wth materiality, tradition, and nature. Key themes in his design philosophy include:
Sense of place: Kuma often spends alot of time analyzing the site, trying to make it feel rooted in context with topography, climate, local materials and craft.
Softness and permeability: Kuma often incorporates porous elements in his designs to create connection with surroundings, including screens, layers, light filters, and shifting rooflines.
Non-imposing presence: Kuma believes in design with modesty: often times letting the site speak for itself rather than create an imposing structure. In terms of material usage, Kuma often uses locally source or recycled materials, similar to vernacular tradition
Design Intent & What They Wanted to Achieve
What Kuma’s teams wanted in these Hangzhou projects includes:
Landscape integration: For the Folk Art Museum, the team aimed for the building to be part of the ground, rather than being on top of it. The floors and elevations were matched to the grounds natural elevation, rooflines undulated like the site’s hills and the structure itself was broken into smaller units, preventing an imposing feeling.
Vernacular identity and memory: In order to tie the site within the local built environment, they used reclaimed roof tiles, old tile screens and locally sourced materials to control lighting and texture, mimicking the village landscape rather than a modern gallery
Preserving industrial identity: For the Xiaohe park project, Kuma wanted to keep the old warehouses, oil tanks and industrial artifacts to preserve the identity of the park, converting many to event spaces, shops and open spaces for public usage. He minimized intervention and let the site's context speak for itself.
Light, shade and public interaction: Kuma used canopies, screens and landscaping to shape light, offering public spaces and creating an ‘inviting’ feeling within the new site. He also opened up the site to views of the river, easing the old industrial tension with nature.
How They Did It — Methods, Tools, and Craft
Some technical craft strategies
Folk Art Museum
Topography-sensitive layout: Rather than an imposing large structure, the museum is split into smaller parallelogram shaped units that are arranged with the hill’s natural gradient. Rather than carving straight edges for roofs and altering the natrual landscape, both the floors and roofs follow the natural incline of the hill, pitching the roof to create smaller cascading line of motion that connects the land below.
Tile screen façades: Rather than using solid walls or conventional shading techniques such as a canopy, Kuma suspend thin screens on stainless steel wires. However, the tiles defy traditional methods as they do not overlap. Rather, the tiles are spaced apart meticulously, allowing light to filter through, yet also changing light throughout the day, shadow and textures inside the galleries. The facade itself is double layered, with a glass wall behind and a tile screen in front, masking the imposing nature of the glass that cuts through the natural landscape.
Height- and scale-control: The entire structure is only 1-2 storeys high, so that it doesn’t dominate the natural landscape, preserving connection with the land
Xiaohe Park
Preservation of structures: Rather than destroy the old oil tanks, Kuma and his team preserved and repurposed many for other spaces and usage, such as a theater, open exhibition areas and shops, preserving the old industrial identity of the site while adapting it to modern needs
Minimal structural intervention: One usage of modern technology was the using a light ETE canopy (ETFE = Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene, a lightweight transparent/translucent membrane) that stretches over parts of the site, connecting different areas of the sites and providing shade and shelter. Due to its light material, it doesn’t feel as imposing as a traditional canopy, and rests seamlessly with the rest of the site.
Material palette & visual coherence: Using old industrial material such as weather corten steel, rusted steel alongside red brick and exposed concrete preserved the industrial identity. However, to create a more lively nature, the usage of more natural lighting and greenery eased tension, attended to colour, texture, age, and atmosphere.
Landscape & spatial layering: By creating a sunken circular garden under the canopy and near repurposed retail areas allowed for natural light and greenery in dark brutalist zones. It also opened up the site architecturally towards its natural surroundings. The stairs help transition between the sites varying levels, offering different conditions as visitors move around.
Comparative Reflections and Design Legacy
Putting Kuma’s work in comparison to Zeitz MOCAA or Tate modern, we can see some striking similarities yet differences.
Like the other 2 projects, Kuma’s works treat built identity, materiality and landscape as the central part of his design philosophy, preserving stories, atmospheres and craft along the way. However, comparing the size and scale of the intervention, Kuma’s style is much more modest, there's no dramatic carving like Zeitz MOCAA and less of using large internal volumes to create new spaces like the old turbine hall. Instead, there is much more intimate layering of materiality and structural elements. Kuma uses different tools, including screen shading, light filtering and shaping to topography, with less heavy structural interventions and more detail to adhering to local materials and traditions.
