OPEN's Ducca Museum: a sanctuary for nature and art

“The Dune Art Museum embodies a unique relationship between interior and exterior. The space speaks of the place, and the materiality coherently fosters the concept.” said Stefano Pujatti, a jury member. Pure, simple and touching, the UCCA Dune Art Museum is a sanctuary for Nature and Art. Its design seeks a return to primal and timeless forms of space, and explores fresh possibilities for the experience of viewing art. Innovatively forming the space into a series of inter-connected, organic-shaped cells, and deliberately hiding the architecture under the sand dune in order to protect this fragile and critical natural component of the coast from the area’s encroaching real-estate developments, the Museum’s design is deeply committed to the site’s natural ecology and environment, and creates an engaging and non-traditional encounter with art and nature.

 

The UCCA Dune Art Museum has also been recognized as Iconic Awards Best of Best by German Design Council in 2017 for its concept design, and named 2019 Building of the Year by Archdaily.

On a quiet beach along the coast of northern China’s Bohai Bay, the UCCA Dune Art Museum designed by OPEN Architecture team is carved into the sand, where it gently disappears.

Countless years of wind have pushed the beach’s sand into a dune along the shore several meters high, stabilized by low-rising shrubs and other ground cover. The museum lies beneath this dune. Enveloped by sand, its interconnected, organically shaped spaces resemble caves—the primeval home of man, whose walls were once a canvas for some of humanity’s earliest works of art. Hidden between the sea and the sand, the design of the Dune Art Museum is simple, pure, and touching—a return to primal and timeless forms of space.

The complex three-dimensional geometry of the Dune Art Museum’s concrete shell was shaped by hand by local workers in Qinhuangdao (some of whom were former shipbuilders), using formwork made from small strips of wood and occasionally, some more elastic materials when tighter curvatures were needed. The architect deliberately retained the irregular and imperfect texture left by the formwork, allowing traces of the building’s manual construction to be felt and seen. In addition, the building’s doors and windows, reception desk, bar counter, and bathroom sinks are all custom-designed and made on-site.

The eight tables in the café are also designed by the architect, each with a distinct shape matching that of the floor plans of the eight main gallery spaces.

The building’s many skylights, each with a different orientation and size, provide carefully tempered natural lighting for the museum’s spaces at all times of the year; its sand-covered roof greatly reduces the building’s summer heat load; and a low-energy, zero-emission ground source heat pump system replaces traditional air conditioning.