
Monet L&L
Hotel, retail and offices in Pudong: four volumes inspired by lotus petals around a square.
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A museum on China’s east coast, overlooking the sea: a new design reinterpreting an existing structure.
The Lota Museum stands in Xiamen, on China’s east coast, right by the sea. It is an unusual intervention: it replaces an earlier project whose load-bearing structure had already been built.
The new design starts from what had already been built and from the client’s new needs, focusing on two themes: the façade, since the existing structure posed few constraints, and the interior space.

Render: Studio DIMThe building’s composition comes from two simple overlapping volumes.
The façade turns a rigid volume into a dynamic organism: a series of sinuous blades developing in three dimensions, changing the building’s relationship with light and with the seascape.
Two simple volumes, overlapping.
Sinuous blades that make a rigid volume dynamic.
A ramp coiling around the columns.
The interior is organised along two routes at different levels, connected by a ramp that coils around the columns and leads visitors through the exhibition rooms.
Credits: Guido Bondielli Architects — Guido Giacomo Bondielli, Stefano Trovato, Luca Bargagli, Andy Chen, Stefano Bozzarelli. Renderings: Studio DIM.