Addition and Renovation of Zhenjiang Museum

Zhenjiang Museum is located in Xijin Ferry, a historical district near the Yangtze River. The old museum is among a group of buildings of the Former British Consulate on Boxian Road as the core. It is an excellent museum of history itself. The core idea of our expansion plan is "Stick to History and Look into the future--the “’Urban Historical Living Room' designed for Zhenjiang". The requirement of the expansion project is to bring connections between new and old buildings from different times along Boxian Rd. Except for the Former British Consulate building complex on the original hillside and current main body of Zhenjiang Museum with a look similar to a 1980s convention center, there are the former site of the Zhenjiang Chamber of Commerce, the Kwong Siew Association of Zhenjiang, and a group of antique clubs that are about ten years old. In other words, the geometric center of the new museum in the future is Boxian Road. In order to retain drive-through-ness, the geometric center must be located outdoors. Therefore, when planning the urban “living room”, an “indoor” cohesive space is needed to combine the independent buildings together to enable the museum to operate as a whole and present a tensioned combination of forms.

The design strategy is to take advantage of the context, that is, to transform this section of the street from a square to an indoor one under the principle of minimal additions. The specific method is to add museum porches and cross-street corridors, utilize new landscape elements to organize the streets in the gaps of the original street trees, and connect the exhibition halls scattered everywhere with the roaming flow lines from indoor to outdoor to further create an indoor environment.