China Academy of Art Mengyuan Campus

The China Academy of Art (CAA), located in Hangzhou, is one of the leading higher education institutions for the arts in China. Established in 1928, it offers a wide range of programs in fine arts, design, and architecture, emphasizing both traditional Chinese and contemporary art practices. The planned Mengyuan Campus, located just two blocks away from its main Xiangshan Campus in Hangzhou, is programmed to house its Department of Fundamentals where the first and second year students receive elementary trainings, as well as CAA's Affiliated High School.



To address the duality of contemporary and traditional Chinese arts in CAA's pedagogy, the design proposal compared between the western and oriental art traditions and their implications on pedagogical spaces. While the western art history built upon linear perspectives and the subsequent separation between man as the observer and nature as the object, traditional Chinese art viewed man and nature as one, developing techniques such as the "scattered perspectives" commonly seen in landscape scrolls. The western fine art education was heavily associated with the studio tradition where still life studies under precisely controlled light remain the focus, whereas traditional Chinese art emphasized liberal education blended into seemingly purposeless social events that take place in nature, as famously known to the west in scripts such as the Lantingji Xu (兰亭集序). This project proposal translates these findings into a dual spatial system: the upper levels of rationally gridded skylit classrooms, juxtaposed with a Chinese garden-inspired ground floor integrating the social and exhibition spaces shared by the student communities in open landscapes.



As part of the program, a precious plaster cast of the Pergamon Altar frieze relief, one of the pinnacles of Hellenistic art, was acquired from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin for this campus. The proposal positions the relief cast in an Art Gallery reconstructing the Pergamon Altar's historical orientation and circulation, pivoting both student learning spaces and public exhibitions at the very center of the campus.



The project was created for an invited Request for Proposal by CAA.