Golden A' Design Award Winner 2022
Within design and spatial semiotics, the curvilinear vocabulary animating this exhibition center landscape resonates with long-established cultural associations between flowing organic forms and naturalness, harmony, and human-scaled gentleness, the wave-form rooflines suggesting water ripples, wind patterns, or topographic contours and thereby encoding symbolic connection between architectural intervention and environmental responsiveness. The reflective water feature operates as powerful symbolic element across multiple cultural traditions: mirrors suggesting self-knowledge, truth, and doubled reality; water representing flow, change, purification, and life force; still water specifically evoking meditation, tranquility, and the contemplative mind; the perfect reflection creating symbolic unity between above and below, reality and image, physical and ethereal realms. The bilateral near-symmetry established through this reflection activates archetypal associations with balance, completeness, and psychological integration, the mirror image suggesting wholeness through the union of opposites and the reconciliation of dualities. The lighting strategy encodes hierarchical meaning through selective emphasis, the warm amber illumination drawing attention to specific architectural moments and suggesting warmth, welcome, inhabitation, and human presence within the broader cool atmospheric envelope, this temperature contrast potentially symbolizing the relationship between human intervention and natural environment, culture and nature, the cultivated and the wild. The horizontal emphasis throughout the composition may evoke stability, repose, groundedness, and connection to earth, these connotations contrasting with vertical architecture's associations with aspiration, transcendence, and upward reach. The liminal temporal moment captured at blue hour carries symbolic freight as threshold time, the transitional period between day and night suggesting boundaries, passages, and liminal states where transformation occurs and normal categories dissolve. The integration of architectural geometry with organic landscape elements could represent reconciliation between built and natural environments, suggesting design philosophy that seeks harmony rather than domination, integration rather than imposition. The undulating roofline's wave-form might reference traditional architectural vocabularies from various cultural traditions that employ curved forms to suggest organic vitality, protective shelter, and environmental responsiveness. The transparent glazed openings revealing warm interior lighting encode accessibility, invitation, and permeable boundaries, suggesting spaces that offer shelter while maintaining visual connection to surrounding environment. The textured central wall with its basketweave patterning provides symbolic counterpoint to surrounding smoothness, potentially representing craft tradition, tactile engagement, and human handiwork within otherwise refined and minimal design language. Water's perfect stillness suggests controlled environment, careful maintenance, and deliberate design intention, the mirror surface requiring absence of wind and disturbance and therefore symbolically representing protected sanctuary removed from turbulent external forces. The silhouetted tree line establishes symbolic frame representing nature, growth, seasonal cycle, and organic realm, its dark mass providing visual and conceptual boundary between designed foreground and natural or semi-natural background. The low horizontal architectural profile may carry connotations of humility, environmental integration, and respectful dialogue with landscape rather than imposing monumentality. The regular rhythm of lighting and structural elements creates symbolic order, pattern, and intentional design, suggesting human capacity to organize and shape environment while the organic curves prevent rigid geometry that might suggest excessive control or mechanical rationality. The overall composition potentially invites interpretation as meditation on relationship between culture and nature, permanence and change, structure and fluidity, with the still water serving as both physical and metaphorical reflecting surface where built environment contemplates itself and viewers encounter doubled reality inviting deeper consideration.
The water line has been turned on and shifts through the whole site plan, shifts the emphasis the water history culture of Dan yang from commercial to social connecting to the nature. The mirror water courtyard accessible public open space to variability of activities.The results to encourage visitors to have memorable through the enjoyment of the diverse community. Art sculptures light up the communal atmosphere. The experience of the integration of tradition and modernity, is shuttle in nature, a journey chasing the light.