Yingliang Stone Archive英良石材档案馆

Yingliang Stone Archive converts a disused factory hall in Beijing's Jiuchang Art Park into a small stone gallery with a restaurant, bar and café: a place to show the diversity of stone and its craft, and for architects to think through their designs in stone. As modern processing makes stone ever thinner and more polished, the material risks losing its weight and spirit, and is easily replaced by other materials; the project sets out to recover them.

The design starts from the moment in the quarry when a line of drill holes splits a block from the mountain. The seven-metre-high hall is imagined as a single piece of stone, cut by angled planes: the solids hold exhibition, meeting and archive spaces, the voids become circulation, and the cutting planes are materialised as walls built entirely from recycled quarry waste. Three layers lead from street to interior — a perforated wall of thousands of 10 cm stone cubes, with funnel-shaped openings for the entrance, a clerestory and the restaurant, enclosing a garden; an outward-tilting wall stacked from rough mountain skins still marked by the chisel; and a zigzag screen of thin rubble slabs held in a welded steel frame, which both separates and connects the double-height gallery and the archive above.

Steel and stone are combined in perforated, suspended and inclined constructions, so that stone becomes both the object on show and its backdrop. In the catering wing, furniture and lighting are made from polished slabs and ultra-thin stone veneers, and a parametrically patterned stone carpet ties restaurant, bar and café together.