Courtyard Renovation for the GuanZhong Mangba Art Festival

In 2023, the Mangba Art Festival invited architects to participate as exhibitors for the first time. We were commissioned to renew a courtyard in the village of Caijiapo, in the Huyi District of Xi'an. This project is situated north of the Qinling Mountains, where, in 2018, teachers and students from the Experimental Art Department of the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, led by Mr. Wu Xiaochuan, founded the Guanzhong Art Cooperative. This initiative also led to the Guanzhong Mangba Art Festival, which has since launched a series of art and rural construction projects.

As participating architects, we were tasked with transforming the north side of a courtyard into a cultural space for exhibitions. The site was originally an abandoned kitchen and a dilapidated warehouse. Each summer, the courtyard becomes waterlogged due to heavy rains. Our goal is to address these fundamental functional issues and explore new strategies for revitalizing the local village. Additionally, we aim to introduce refreshing elements to the environment, allowing people to connect more closely with the space.

We took inspiration from the wave-shaped tile elements in local residential buildings and allowed them to flow down the sloping roof, creating a facade texture reminiscent of a curtain. At the entrance of the exhibition hall, we designed a circular passage that invites visitors to explore the north end of the courtyard. This passage triggers wave-shaped metal mesh curtain to rotate, generating multiple paving lines that serve as a rainwater drainage guidance system within the courtyard.

The courtyard has been carefully designed with varying heights, ensuring channels into a linear drainage ditch pre-buried at the south end. This design helps maintain comfort of the courtyard and the exhibition hall's floor.

The circular pathway connects the two fruit trees in the courtyard and a tree behind the house. It also allows for imaginative renewal of the landscape on the north side of the house.

We prefabricated the stainless-steel perforated panels in sections at factory and assembled them on-site in just two days. The size and spacing of the holes in the metal panels have been carefully designed to create multiple effects, including transparency, mirror reflection, and shadow generation. As people visit the courtyard at different times, they encounter a variety of atmospheres. Sometimes, the blue sky and sunshine make the brick wall behind serve as the focal point, while at other times, the metal mesh appears transparent, allowing the original house to stand out. Our goal is to evoke the feeling of flowing water through these designs.

The brick wall within the exhibition hall was removed to create a spacious and smooth environment. A triangular lightweight steel frame was added to reinforce the roof. The kitchen chimney was preserved and transformed into a skylight niche, which not only showcases physical exhibits but also provides a seating area for visitors to relax.