An ensemble of low-rise buildings containing administrative offices and reception halls are located in the new "ambassadorial" area on the hills rising above the center of the American capital. The project, which Pei worked with his sons, differs from his earlier buildings for the PRC leadership - the Beijing Xiangshan Hotel, built at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. and which became the first work of a foreign architect in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the Suzhou Museum (2006): references to traditional national architecture are implicit (except perhaps the diamond-shaped form of window openings), and the laconic geometry of limestone-faced volumes is closer to the architect's European buildings. The small size of the building plot and its irregular shape did not allow complementing the building with landscape design, but the different heights of individual buildings and their free location relative to each other do not allow for a monumental, heavy image of the stronghold of the powers that be to emerge. The central volume, completed by a lightwell "tube", hides an octagonal vestibule and grand staircases that connect a corridor of meeting and reception rooms on the ground floor with an auditorium for 200 people, a conference center and an underground banquet hall. The interiors are faced with the same French limestone as the facades of the complex; they are enlivened by Pei lamps, anegre panels, fountains and traditional Chinese landscape paintings on silk.
2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-09 00:51
