Architecture | Casanova + Hernandez’s Ceramic Museum and Mosaic Garden in Jinzhou | CFile

We admit it: initially we were skeptical about the design for the Ceramic Museum in Jinzhou, China. From a distance it looks like something from a terrifyingly angular Candyland board, Lisa Frank as inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.

But maybe we were being too dismissive. It’s the middle of winter and we’re grouchy from not having seen the sun in several months. What Casanova + Hernandez Architects created when they completed the project this year is a kind of ceramic prism which blasts color, light, and a message of cultural hybridization onto the landscape. The sensory overload that one experiences when seeing the structure from a distance doesn’t diminish upon closer inspection, either. Check out how these tiles expose more and more detail the closer you get.

Beyond being a home for artwork and a place to visit, sit, or play, the building and the surrounding park are a message of cultural exchange. The location hosted the 2013 Jinzhou World Landscape Art Exposition and after that became a central park in an urban development. We’ll let the architects describe it in their own words.

The design of the Expo is based on the paradox that globalization, although it has typically been associated with the destruction of local cultural identity, may also be able to generate some kind of identity. The Mosaic Park project goes beyond that and aims to create a link between citizens and the place, giving a wider meaning to the site.

The project experiments with the concept of cultural hybridization, which is a phenomenon developed during many centuries of commercial and cultural exchange between West and East.

On the one hand, the use of broken local ceramic pieces of different colours for the materialization of the pavement and benches of the park and for the facades of the museum evokes the mosaic tradition that was widespread throughout Europe by the Roman Empire and that has evolved along history till the present day bringing technical solutions such as the trecandís technique used by the Catalan modernist architects.

On the other hand, the geometry of the park is inspired by the crackled glaze of the Chinese porcelain developed from the 10th century during the Song Dynasty in the Ru Ware and Ge Ware ceramic pieces. The Mosaic park and the Ceramic Museum remind citizens that the Jinzhou region was once a production area of ceramic and porcelain, although this tradition was lost for centuries, being nowadays forgotten.

Ultimately, it’s an ambitious project that could have easily turned saccharine in the hands of someone with less imagination.

Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.

Above image: Ceramic Museum in Jinzhou, China by Casanova + Hernandez Architects. Courtesy of the architects.