Architects Unveil a Four-Building Cultural Cluster Beside Zishan Lake in China

A Chinese-German architecture office has designed a group of four public buildings on the shore of Zishan Lake in Xianning, a city in Hubei Province in central China. The centrepiece is a 3,000-square-metre museum, according to Dezeen, the design publication that reported the project.

The architects are Büro Ziyu Zhuang, which works from Beijing and Germany. The buildings sit inside parkland, set into the slope rather than standing on top of it. They were designed to complement the guest houses of the Ziyouji resort, which lies on the far side of the lake.

The main building is the Zi Museum. Its structure is made of pale concrete, arranged in several layers and built around a central courtyard, an open-air space enclosed by the building on all sides. Visitors can enter at three separate points, each at a different height, so the route follows the natural rise and fall of the land.

The other three buildings each have a distinct role:

• A meditation tower. It is a viewpoint with a staircase that winds around a hollow centre, so visitors climb up through the middle of the structure.
• A rammed-earth workshop. Rammed earth is a wall material made by packing damp soil tightly into moulds. This building is partly sunk into the ground, and a walking ramp leads up to a rooftop covered in grass.
• A bookshop. Its roof overhangs the path, and a glass front opens onto the parkland and the lake.

Büro Ziyu Zhuang has built public spaces in very different settings before. In Inner Mongolia it created Prairie Ark, a public gallery shaped like a flying saucer and set on open grassland, as Dezeen reported in May. In Chengdu, its Longquan Mountain Observatory has sweeping, meandering roofs, a design that Dezeen covered when it opened in 2023. The office also renovated its own base, a courtyard building on Beijing's central axis near the Drum Tower.

For anyone planning a visit, the set-up is simple to picture. You arrive by the lake, pick one of three entrances, and wind your way up through the concrete rooms and courtyard. You can then climb the tower, walk up the earth-built workshop's ramp to the grass, or stop at the bookshop with the water in view. The whole group is meant to be used as a single park, not as four separate stops.

Xianning is not a city most international visitors would know. This project puts it on the map of contemporary public architecture, and the architects say the buildings are there for anyone who walks the lakeshore. Whether they become a regular stop for local families will be seen only once the doors are open to the public.