Zhangjiajie Sandstone Painting Museum

The "Wulingyuan Scenic Area," a UNESCO World Heritage site, is located in Zhangjiajie, which boasts beautiful natural scenery. The sandstone paintings born here are a modern art form native to Zhangjiajie, rich in Chinese and especially local Zhangjiajie artistic characteristics.



The Sandstone Painting Museum is the concrete artistic creation of architects' years of research on fractal geometry theory. The museum's geometric composition is based on modern fractal geometry art practice. In fractal geometry, using the iterative Sierpinski triangle and different parameters can simulate the shapes of most plants in nature and expand into geometric shapes found in nature.



The museum's exterior is composed of thin two-dimensional lattices, with a spatial dimension between one and two dimensions. This outer layer is neither a one-dimensional line nor a two-dimensional surface but can be approximately considered a semi-transparent two-dimensional surface. The design also incorporates the concept of random fractals, where the facade is neither a realistic natural plant nor a mechanical geometric plane, but rather grows wildly like thickets covering the hills.



The museum's form is a coarse-grained reorganization of rock, an important principle in fractal geometry. The architectural four-dimensional experience is a physical four-dimensional spacetime, which is completely different from the mathematical multi-dimensional and fractional-dimensional meanings. Mathematics can have multiple to infinite dimensions. In simple terms, the dimension of mathematical space expresses the complexity of spatial composition, reflecting the effectiveness of complex forms occupying space. Both Chinese dragon and pyramids are typical fractal compositions.



The building extracts the typical composition of sandstone paintings, with overlapping diagonal lattice structures that resemble the texture of the building depicted with sandstone. The inner layer is stacked with local stone, resembling the texture of a canvas.



The stilted building is a traditional residential building of the Tujia ethnic group in Zhangjiajie. The sandstone painting abstracts the poetic imagery of the Tujia stilted building, "deep in the mountains, hidden from view, the entire village resides in the painting", into a series of beautiful landscape paintings, becoming a deeply ingrained new cultural and artistic work in Zhangjiajie.