I recently checked in on the construction progress of the Guardian Art Center project in Beijing by Buro Ole Scheeren. From the outside, the project is nearly complete. The diagram of an elegant glass volume floating above a series of stone clad intersecting boxes reads quite nicely against its immediate context in Beijing, which includes a hodgepodge of functional modern, Chinese post-modern, and vernacular Hutong buildings. I was pleasantly impressed by the level of rigor and the quality of execution, most evidently demonstrated by the jointing of the stone facades on a rotated grid with squares and triangles. The glass curtain wall, which sheaths the Puxuan hotel and spa program behind, is also a nice texture inside out. Its running bond pattern, articulated with a handsome reveal mullion profile, vaguely refers to the brick walls of the hutong houses while cleverly hiding the all too apparent reading of a spandrel typical on curtain walls. As a result, the wall achieves a scaleless quality that is rather appealing and unique in this part of town. Combining a major art museum with an auction house as well as a boutique hotel, the building is poised to set a new example of mixed use projects both in terms of typology and design. For Ole, the now seminal CCTV headquarters building is a tough act to follow, and I think his office did a great job answering to that challenge and I look forward to the opening of the project later this year.
