Historically, Longquan celadon is a type of green-glazed Chinese ceramic, known as celadon or green ware, produced from about AD950-AD1550. The national Archaeological Park is built to preserve the Longquan historical kiln conservation sites in Dayao village. This visitor center sits on the south gate of the park.
The exhibition center is one of the major attractions in this large conservation area. It offers people exhibitions with collections from recent discoveries and the documents which show the whole process of the archaeological discovery. The spatial organization of programs doesn’t follow a conventional order but creates a dialogue between spaces and landscapes. Each space is considered as an individual room, which is distributed along the hill so people could walk in between them as if there is no one single building but many. The rooms facing mountains are film display room and waiting lounge. Several Exhibitions galleries are allocated in the middle of this field in different elevations. The uppermost rooms serve as research office and administration office.
In this project, we want to create an environment where people could walk through and see through from place to place without a specific order. The separation of each room offers people a sense of discover between man-made space and nature environment. The roof covers almost the entire site but it opens up with several courtyards.
The key feature of this project is that we use glass brick as the main material for the walls. It has two layers of glass bricks: the depth in-between creates the display shelter for the exhibition. The glass brick allows limited lights in, which keep the gallery in a mystery environment. The two lifted galleries use glass as the floor, which allows visitors see through and watch the exhibiting pottery ruins on the ground, under the “glass box”.