BEDDING IN AT THE EDGE OF THE ORIGIN
A NEW MUSEUM FOR SHEKOU
A study in stone seven ways, this City Museum tells the story of Shekou, Shenzhen through the life-cycle of granite. It is imagined to long-outlive the artefacts it displays and histories it accounts. The project looks to new models of museology, embracing the understanding that visitors better relate to exhibited artefacts through an experience of the work in its context, or 'neighbourhood'.
The project takes inspiration from Shekou's radical development, whereby mountains were broken into the sea to form landfill for new cityscape. Against a backdrop of Chiwan Mountain, the building offers an immersive journey through the processes and products of granite fabrication. Built upon the principles of taphonomy, carved marks and scars in the rock provide context and framing to the overlayed artefacts on display, bringing together the archaeological and the anthropological.
STAGE 01
'ENTERING'
STAGE 02
'PERFORMING'
STAGE 03
'INTERACTING'
EXHIBITING THE IMMERSION
The architecture performs as a staged reconstruction – the inhabited diorama – to acclimatise the visitor with the neighbourhood from which the artefacts on display originate. This process of orientation repeats as a sequence along the visitor journey, in an act of architecture and artefact co-curation.
