China Xuan Paper Culture and Art Center

Located in Jing County, Xuancheng City, Anhui Province, China's Xuan Paper Town, with Hongxing Xuan Paper Mill as the core and Xuan Paper culture as the carrier, is a characteristic town integrating production, display, sales, accommodation, research, tourism and other functions. Adjacent to the Xuan Paper Museum and surrounded by mountains, the site is the entrance of the town, and the white outdoor paper drying field shows a rolling state along with the mountain. The building is built next to a stream, involving four functional blocks: a visitor center, a Xuan Paper production and demonstration area, an experience and a retail area.

Based on the design concept of "walking in the paper mountain", the project attempts to present the Oriental grandeur and poetry with a garden-style continuous spatial experience. The concept comes from the traditional Chinese landscape painting "Lake and Mountain in A Spring Morning", in which the painter divides the mountain into many sections, and the overlapping mountain parts wrap the figures with endless fold, depth and serenity, arousing the endless reverie. Inside this opened mountain, people can glimpse a detailed and orderly artificial landscape, and get a continuous and immersive experience. Architects use the layering and interlacing of white concrete slices to present a world that is constantly opened up. At the same time, this dynamic and orderly external image constructed in the repeated and gradual process is the expression of the "momentum" of the mountain. Thanks to the large enough building volume, the simple repetition will bring a continuous impact. Visitors are like falling into an interlocking dream, and gradually acquire rich and strong memories related to the "paper mountain" and change from visual experience to physical experience. Finally, with the help of three different climbing paths, the three buildings meet in a continuous roof space. Here, layers of white shear wall crown rise and fall into a single white ridge over 200 meters long. To obtain the facade texture and smoothness as gentle, white and natural as Xuan Paper, the team made a large number of matching experiments and process attempts in the early stage of construction. The white fair-faced concrete uses white cement as the main gel material and white or light-colored ore as the aggregate. The template is 3D printed and cut to improve the processing progress. From the laboratory sample to the 1:1 in-situ casting sample experiment, this provides a good guarantee for the smooth progress of the project implementation. The structure design adopts a continuous concrete shear wall system. The transverse distribution of the building with closely spaced partitions is adopted, and the landing part is used as a concrete shear wall. Based on repeated calculations and experiments, the thickness of each concrete wall is controlled at 200 mm when the height of the wall is up to 12 meters and the single span is up to 36.9 meters. Layers of paper mountains still keep the unique light image of Xuan Paper materials.