X Museum / Studio NOR

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01. A Special Design Brief 
X Museum was founded by two young collectors born in the 1990s, focusing specifically on new generation of artists and multiculturalism from a young perspective. The site for its new museum is an old warehouse located in Langyuan Station, an “Internet celebrity campus” filled with creative professionals, boutique stores and trendy restaurants. The design brief requires the new museum space should not only fulfill art exhibition needs, but also have the flexibility to hold various events and create “Instagrammable” spatial scenarios for social media publicity. Besides exhibition galleries, the brief also listed three commercial programs as major public spaces within the musuem that can be independently operated regardless of the museum opening hours: a gift shop, a café and a restaurant. The founders’ expectation for the new museum is “a cool, comprehensive lifestyle place to embrace diverse possibilities.

X Museums’ strong willingness to embrace contemporary lifestyle and explore the future is quite special. In the past 30 years, with the diversification of the way people access to new information, museums have already changed their relationship with the visitors from “one-way education” to “two-way interaction”. The architecture of art museums has also changed from serious, self-contained “white box” stereotype to more inclusive and open spaces providing visitors with unique spatial experiences. Clearly, X Museum’s careful selection of its location and vision is trying to interweave art institutions further into the daily life of the mass public and social media popularity. This unreserved embrace of “Trend” renders the project with a Pop-style critical touch since the beginning of the design process.

02. A Renovated Old Warehouse
The red brick building where the museum is located was originally the No. 10 warehouse of the Beijing Textile Warehouse. It was built in the 1960s and was used to store cotton and other strategic supplies during the planned economy era. Small changes and renovations took place along the time until 2018, when the site underwent major changes. The original building was almost demolished, leaving only the red brick exterior facade with window openings filled by new bricks. Within this remained facade, a huge steel structure with a truss skylight roof was erected. The cavity between the old and new walls was used for mechanical conduits and pipelines. A new concrete platform was built in the middle of the new steel structure as functional space, connecting to a new outdoor egress ramp by two bridges.

When we got involved in the project, we were faced with the above-mentioned site that had been drastically renovated and mixed with traces from different times, and there are many even more radical renewal cases in Langyuan Station. On the one hand, the minimal remains of the original building reduced our pressure on historical preservation when dealing with such an industrial relic renovation project; on the other hand however, we didn’t want to blindly ignore what had already been done to the site. From the perspective of budget, sustainability and honest respect to history, we hope to keep the results of previous renovations along the way as much as possible.

03. Valley Making 
The design started from section. The prior renovation resulted in the monumental new truss skylight roof to be the only natural light source, plus the linear massing and short-end main entrance location of the warehouse, we naturally associated the site with the idea of a “valley”. Since the concrete platform that occupied the entire interior did not meet the ceiling height requirements of exhibition galleries and blocked the skylight to the first floor as well as visitors’ perception of the actual scale of the site, we decided to dismantle it and keep the rest of the past renovation remnants. The programed volumes required by the museum’s design brief were arranged along the two long side walls, leaving a narrow skylit space-the “Valley”-in the middle as both a main circulation path and an exhibition space. These sectional spatial arrangements allow both the two floors to have access to the skylight, and take advantage of the powerful visual impact of the 13-meter-high floor to ceiling height. Meanwhile, the mechanical cavity from the last renovation can be kept for use by the new programmed volumes, and the “Valley” creates possibility for each exhibition gallery to be managed independently.

The programmed volumes were originally designed as independent boxes stacked together, referring to the warehouse cargo stacking. However, as the design brief was adjusted during the design process, the area needed for each program gradually increased, resulted in the boxes squeezing and merging with each other, and ultimately had to be completely connected into one. We find this merging process is quite similar to geological changes that echoes the “Valley” concept. Therefore, while maintaining the sectional strategy unchanged, we “allowed” the formal independency of the boxes to degrade to only hinted by a few subtly tilted walls. Thus, the programed volumes on both sides of the “Valley” became continuous intriguing “mountain rocks” composed of many originally independent fragments. There is no spatial hierarchy among these isomorphic forms, they are different yet mixed into one. It’s not easy for visitors to capture an overall image or representative angle of the museum space, but the homogeneity of materials and forms of the linked fragments can still present a certain vaguely unified spatial experience.

The binary division of the “Valley” and the “Mountain Rocks” creates a new spatial layering of “outside” and “inside” within the interior, and metaphorically juxtapose the experience that visitors will have in X Museum to one would experiencing in a real valley in the nature – not unlike the metaphorical narrative adopted by traditional Chinese gardens and paintings: the lobby, a double-height open atrium for events and large installations, is the “lake” that one have to cross to enter the “Valley”; the staff office on top of Gallery No.3, as the highest volume in the whole museum, is the “peak” of the “mountains”; six galvanized steel sliding doors – the highest being 8 meters tall – hanging on special warehouse gate tracks, are “waterfalls”. After entering the “Valley”, visitors will shuttle back and forth between the “valley” and the “mountain” via a series of apertures, stairs and bridges. Although meandering in an interior space, the spatial experience is like that of an outdoor environment.

04. Hanging Frames 
The client clearly required us to design a “more noisy” facade in order to attract public in the visually overload Langyuan Station campus, which filled with exaggerated facade designs. This request reminded us of the “Salon Hang”, an exhibition display style originated from the Paris Salon, featuring with layers of crowded paintings on a wall, competing to show off themselves for public attention – essentially transforming a gallery wall into a mass media for the artists and viewers to interact with each other. We also recalled many typologically similar forms, from traditional Chinese cliff inscriptions, temple plaques, and collection seals on scroll paintings and calligraphies, to the street billboards, the “Masonry Layouts” of webpage, and even the Danmaku subtitle of online videos. All of these communicating forms convey information of differentiated individuals in a collective way, presenting powerful visual tensions through the juxtaposition of fragments.

Therefore, we set up 13 “Frames” and 3 “Exhibition Niches” on the exterior facade to display signs, banners, graphic arts and installations, turning the street into an “outdoor gallery” for the museum to externalize its content and interact with pedestrians. The 8 “Frames” that were eventually implemented after several rounds of value engineering are concentrated on the most populated street corner of the facade. The one “Frame” on the ground floor is used as a sliding gate for vehicles and large art works to enter the building, while the rest 7 “Frames” contain LED screens, slanted mirror niches and expanded metal mesh. As for the “Exhibition Niches”, there are one protruding out and one carved into the facade, while the third and largest one being cantilevered above the southwest corner of the remaining red brick wall, consisting of two mirroring side surfaces and a LED screen ceiling. It holds a huge golden X sign as well as three mirrored reflections of the X in its inside corner. This slightly surrealist installation is both the major sign of the museum and a parody response to the many cartoonish decorative facade sculptures in the Langyuan Station campus.

As for the red brick facade-the only original industrial relic remained on site, we responded in a subtle way by attaching a new layer of glass facade outside of the first-floor brick wall as windows and doors. This layer of glass covers the openings as well as part of the brick wall, transforming the original facade into an exhibit protected in glass showcase for the pedestrians walking by, silently reminding them of the stie’s past history.

05. A space for each and all 
The rich forms and diverse paths of X Museum offer an ever-changing yet concise spatial experience, which provides flexibility for curators and artists, as well as possibilities for different kinds of events. Since the opening of the new building, we have been tracking the daily use status and social media exposure of the museum, and are often surprised by how creatively the curation team use the galleries and the visitors interact with certain spaces. The intricacy of the isomorphic “linked fragments” and the dynamic circulation makes our “top-down” design into a loosely structured framework allowing and even inspiring users’ spontaneous “bottom-up” interaction. This grants each visitor to find their own “favored space” according to the different state of mind each time they visit, while not feeling segregated from the overall space. This balance may also be a reflection of the entangled mentality of people trying to pursue individual independence and collective consensus at the same time in today’s society. Therefore, our ideal spatial image of the X Museum cannot be captured in a specific photo or reflected in a specific visitor’s impression, but should be the overlaid, fuzzy-edged intersection of layers of visitors’ personal experiences superimposed together.

Stepping down from the serious aloof altar, a museum is trying to attract the public, squeezing into people’s daily life, and exploring the future boundaries in a rather exuberant manner – this could not be more serious. What kind of spatial image should a physical art museum present to the younger generations? The architectural design of X Museum attempts to answer this question by offering an intimate daily life scene with an ambiguous sense of detachment and monumentality.