Architect, Huang Wenjing: I’m Huang Wenjing. I’m the founding partner of OPEN Architecture.
Architect, Li Hu: I’m Li Hu, also the founding partner of OPEN.
Huang Wenjing: What you’re looking at is Dune Art Museum, located in Northern China. And it’s composed of a series of cave-like exhibition spaces, hidden underneath a dune.
Li Hu: Wenjing and I were just walking on the beach and passed by this beautiful stretch of dune.
Huang Wenjing: The developer often clear out the dunes to make way for oceanfront developments, but our intention was of keeping the dune.
Li Hu: The design is convergence of several different things in our minds. One of them being that the very beginning places that human created art is in caves. And also, when you’re building something into the dune, when we put all the sand back, it’s an enormous amount of load above. So the dome becomes a very natural structural form to make.
This site is oceanfront, with lots of salt in the air. Concrete can last in this harsh environment.
Huang Wenjing: In the original drawing, we were thinking of very smooth building, with plastering over the concrete to make it perfect. But we decided the raw concrete looked so touching. When we covered the building back with sand, we didn’t choose any of the beautiful trees or grass. It's just the native plants that immediately grow back, like magic.
Li Hu: Anything you made in this practice, you’re changing the landscape of this planet, so that is a responsibility. Can building really become part of nature instead of replace nature? The Dune project speaks for the possibility that we can co-exist.