Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum: a Brutalist dream in the Chinese province of Zhejiang

The constructions that allow the most important architects to show their skills?

Museums. From Renzo Piano to Rem Koolhaas, from Jean Nouvel to Zaha Hadid, everyone, each according to his own style, has tried to design an iconic place in which to preserve art.

This long list of architects is also adding the Atelier Deshaus, a Shanghai-based studio that has just completed the structural renovation of a concrete industrial building in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, transforming it into the Taizhou Contemporary Art Museum.

The project, located inside the cultural and creative park of Shamen Grain Depot, occupies a total construction space of 2,450 square meters, with eight exhibition rooms arranged on four floors that are developed in a large area of former factories and warehouses in style of the former Soviet Union.

The museum was conceived to form an innovative artistic spatial atmosphere through the comparison between the roughness of the concrete cast in place and the space formed by the parallel barrel vaulted structure which implies an integration between interior and exterior, perfectly integrating the lighting system.

Visitors will enter the building through a lobby, which adjoins an external public square and can host public events, including a café and an art shop.

A spiral staircase leads to the exhibition rooms, which, although of different levels, share a sort of spatial transparency that gives the impression that one is inserted into the other.

The top floor room with vaulted vaulted ceiling offers guests a wide view of the surrounding mountain range.