The Exhibition Hall is located in the rural Bingan Warf, a shoal in the middle of the Chishui river, at the border between the regions of Guizhou and Sichuan, in South-West China. The village is located on a deep ditch on dangerous cliffs, where there wasn’t a lot of flatland to build upon - which caused the town to develop its own architectural style that takes advantage of the mountainous layout, with hanging stilted wooden buildings, 20 meters higher than the river level.
On the central commercial street, West-line Studio was asked to restore a historic building, that had been left abandoned in bad conditions, in order to host the Warf Memorial Museum.
The renovated hall, all made out of wood in the most typical architectural style of northern Guizhou villages, aims to hide in between Bingan’s buildings, making the inside a new and contrasting experience. The tenon-and-mortise structure has been generally applied for anchoring vertical and horizontal wood, whilst wooden grafts were recycled from the old building’s ruins.
From the outside, the building remains sympathetic to the village’s original character, whilst the inside is a dense assembly of vertical wooden sticks that ‘zoom’ space in unexpected ways, screening and opening views along the exhibition route. The dramatic use of coloured lights comes from the skylights to create a bright, vibrant atmosphere, where the light, with the obsessive presence of wooden lines, marks the space - remembering the new generations of what ‘warf memory’ is.
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