WuliEpoch Culture Center is a Hybrid showroom and Community Centre for a Residential Compound

WuliEpoch Culture Center is a hybrid showroom and community centre for a residential compound in northwest Beijing. Surrounded by the Badachu Monastery, Fragrance Hill Mountain, and the Western Hills-mountain chain, the project attempts to create a triptych of architecture, landscape and interior design.  

A circumferential path creates a spatial dialogue with the encompassing landscape, with a dynamic, shifting relationship between the eye and the vista. The path moves between exterior and interior: it hovers up from the ground to the second floor, then turns to the third-floor banquet hall, before exiting to the exterior roofscape. It continues folding up and down on the roof, and then moves gradually along another path down to the ground of the forecourt, where the path began. 

As a community centre, the project tries to address people’s spiritual and religious needs and define the spiritual quest in daily life. The circulation logic aligns with the philosophy of the space, representing the endless, evolving quest from the inner self to the outer landscape that defines the truth of life. 

A new courtyard typology was designed; instead of enclosing space rectangularly, walls crisscross one another on multiple levels, creating a rich syntax of irregular courtyards that are varied in size, scale, and sectional relations. 

Nature is interpreted in three ways: ‘autumn foliage in Western Hills’ is depicted by the field of glittering wood-laminated aluminium panels; an ‘inverted Western Hills’ is created by curved arrays of ceiling panels; recycled concrete blocks are cut into thin pieces and arranged to mimic hills and waterfalls.

Project Information

Architect: Atelier Alter Architects