Kunqu Opera School
Students were first tasked with developing an appropriate program for one of four sites located within the old city district of Suzhou. Site number three, located to the west of the Kunqu Opera Museum, seemed best served by a Kunqu Opera School that would house artists in residence. Kunqu opera, specific to the Wu region, is one of the oldest forms of Chinese Opera and was designated by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Often performed in the garden, the program was well suited for a studio interested in the spatial condition of the Chinese garden.
2019 AIA Maryland Student Award Winner.
Public programmatic components such as a café and community center invite the community in, enabling interaction with the school and art of Kunqu opera, with the intention of bringing the community closer to their cultural heritage. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger describes a bridge as connecting two locales to make a single locale. Similarly, the campus connects people and heritage to create a unified community and evoke dwelling. A simple addition and subtraction method was utilized as an interventional strategy. Placement of these additions was driven by the underlying principles that is shared by both Kunqu opera and Chinese gardens. Much like the opera, which has no over-arching or repeated melody, the garden has no immediately evident underly geometry, nor a single view that unveils the entire scheme. This project also attempts to mediate between how one moves through the city versus how ones moved through a Chinese garden.