Guilin: A Glass Landscape Cube by Tengyuan Design

Exhibition Center Inspired by Guilin's Natural Beauty

Tengyuan Design's approach to the Guilin Culture and Tourism Exhibition Center was to design it based on the landscape, express it in a certain shape, and endow it with a meaning. The result is a pure glass box that arouses people's inner feelings for nature and landscape. The building remains a minimalist cube, with the only difference being the processed curtain wall that creates a "landscape cube".

The design integrates artificial elements and abstract nature, revealing the modernity of the showcased building while incorporating Guilin's unique scenery. The reflection of the building in water on the front plaza adds layers and expressiveness to the structure. Vertical glass ribs, arranged evenly and projected onto the glass curtain wall, create a subtly changing dramatic effect under different illumination conditions due to the abundant overlapped transmissions, reflections, and refractions among the glass layers.

The project covers a total of 4021 square meters. The glass ribs rise and fall vertically, forming rolling hill shades on the building. Two sets of glass ribs, different in density and vertical height, form three levels of hill shades on the building elevation, including the "close view", "medium view", and "distant view".

China has a longstanding tradition of bamboo culture, and Guilin also abounds in natural bamboo resources. Tengyuan Design has incorporated a bamboo gallery on the main sightseeing route in the showroom to create an artistic conception of a bamboo forest. The project started in May 2016 in Guilin and was completed in September 2018.

One of the challenges faced by the design team was ensuring the building curtain wall not only showed a spatial structure composed of distant, medium and close views, but also kept nightscape animation effects consistent with one another. After many discussions and technical communications, the team decided to build a glass curtain wall with cantilever glass ribs. The result is a building that presents the spatial structure and poetic conception of the landscape in Guilin using different construction methods and surface processing methods.

The design was awarded the Golden A' Architecture, Building and Structure Design Award in 2020. This prestigious award is granted to marvelous, outstanding, and trendsetting creations that reflect the designer's prodigy and wisdom. They are venerated products and bright ideas that advance art, science, design, and technology, embodying extraordinary excellence and significantly impacting the world with their desirable characteristics.