The Yinchuan Museum is the flagship building of the Yellow He Art Center (YRAC), which is being built 20 km from the center of Yin Chuan in an area known as the site of the most ancient settlements in mainland China, the "cradle of Chinese civilization."
Unsurprisingly, We Architech Anonymous (WAA), a Chinese firm, took inspiration from the millennia-old layered sediments left behind by the changed bed of the Yellow River.
The embossed facade of the museum of intertwining, curving ribbons repeats the folded structure of the coast and allows the conventional language of architecture to reproduce the natural environment.
The smooth flowing surfaces of the walls required the use of a particularly pliable and malleable building material. This material was glass concrete or glass fiber concrete - glass fiber reinforced concrete (GRC, Glassfiber reinforced concrete). Glass fiber reinforces the structure and shapes the shape.
Glass concrete was developed in the late 60s of the last century as an alternative to traditional concrete with low tensile strength. In traditional reinforced concrete, metal reinforcement solves this problem, but this makes the material heavy. Reinforcement of concrete with fiberglass, which has a high tensile strength, increases the tensile and bending resistance of concrete by 4-5 times, while maintaining the high compressive strength characteristic of ordinary concrete, and does not make it heavier. Frost resistance of glass concrete is more than 300 cycles. It is fireproof and practically waterproof. Highly resistant to cracking. Usually, panels for curtain facades are made from it, fragments and details of complex shapes are cast.
In this case, the entire building is built from glass concrete. In China, glass concrete has never been used on this scale before. After pouring a mixture of concrete and fiberglass into the computer-generated formwork, a very thin, but at the same time durable structure will be obtained. Then, on the construction site, a facade will be assembled from such fragments. High precision and computerized production eliminates the human factor and ensures precise, seamless joining.
