Fuzhou Cross-Strait Cultural Center | BIAD

This project is a “cross-strait” cultural center located in FuZhou, China. Its purpose is to commemorate the connection between China and Taiwan, which is an absurd concept as it is more of a political move to assert China’s undemocratic and aggressive claim of Taiwan as a territory of China. Architecturally it is full of pathetic metaphors that neither makes sense nor address issues of the local culture it claims to promote . It is a plastic conceptual project that regurgitates the Communist government’s ironic promotion of the “Greater China” and its claim of Chinese culture as a social stabilizer.

The project is divided into two buildings, each metaphorically representing a “tree” of Chinese culture, with three levels or articulation. The first is the Roots that define the ground plane, landscapes and lower levels of the building, which illustrate the Chinese culture emerges from the earth of china. The coordinated movement of the two root systems – each symbolizing cultural versus commercial – on the site then becomes one network unifying the site into a park that welcomes all points of circulation. The second is the branches that grow from the roots to wrap the “cultural fruit” that float above the roots and connect the different components to make them a unified whole.

This metaphorically unifying skin uses the visual effect of porous network of branches to define and articulate the skin of the building in two ways – as a perforated façade system and a translucent lightweight tensile roof system that glows internally.

The last part is the “fruits/seeds/tree-houses” that vary in program. Each in the project is positioned in a radical arrangement pointing out of the tree towards various destinations of cultural significance to Chinese heritage. The metaphor is a seed in the earth that grows to become the fruit, which is the cultural by products of the culture itself – opera, film, music, art, commerce, food.