Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum - China

About the project

The city of Jingdezhen in China has a significant history of porcelain production.

The Imperial Kiln Museum was planned by Studio Zhu Pei, right next to the ruins of the Ming dynasty imperial kiln. Eight parabolic brick vaults form the museum complex, including three ground-level and five underground permanent exhibition halls. The cigar-shaped vaults are all slightly different in height, length and curvature, and were modelled on the forms of traditional kilns. They are arranged side by side on the site in a slightly higgledy-piggledy cluster with a roughly north-south orientation. The buildings are interposed by courtyards that let daylight flood into the basements. On the upper floors, light falls through the open or glazed vault ends, through horizontal light slots above the floor, through chinks in the walls and through skylights that resemble kiln smoke holes.

The museum's construction also references the city's porcelain heritage: The vaults consist of double-shell brick walls built in the traditional manner and then filled with concrete. The 2.8 million bricks used here are a mixture of new and reclaimed bricks left over from the demolition of kilns. Thus, this extraordinary project offers everything required of a public space and thoroughly deserved to be the winner, not only of the Sharing public spaces category, but also of the Grand Prize.

"The local tradition of reusing old kiln bricks mixed with new ones is inherited by the museum."