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168 Plymouth: New York’s Industrial Past Meets Modern Urban Living
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Featuring a triangular layout, the Museum has been designed, in Chief architect and founder of Wutopia Lab Yu Ting’s words, as a “slowly unfolding hand scroll” with functional spaces lining the perimeter and a black reflecting pool in the centre. Varying in both thickness and transparency, the building’s gently curving perimeter zone connects three monolithic volumes that seem to float on the reflecting pool: an oval-shaped concrete volume containing a small theatre, a glass cube housing a dance studio, and a cylindrical “glittering glass fortress” where yoga sessions take place. Unlike the three symmetrical volumes, the perimeter zone is organically shaped, widening to accommodate spaces such as the art gallery and tea room, with narrower sections serving as corridors.
Inspired by the brushstrokes used in Chinese painting, the boundary walls shift from continuous floor-to-ceiling glazing (made possible by a slender cast-concrete ceiling slab supported by steel beams concealed within internal walls), to solid walls, through to latticework, forming “a shifting ink line”, as Ting points out. The variation in transparency, which can also be found in the pool-facing wall sections, enhances the Museum’s sculptural design but also serves a more practical reason, namely controlling natural light and views according to functionality.
As the most introverted of all the spaces, the theatre’s solid volume is punctured only by a curved skylight that allows both sun and moonlight to spill into the cavernous space like a “waterfall”. On the contrary, the glass-enclosed dance and yoga studios are inundated with natural lighting, with the former clad in translucent glazing panels for privacy, and the way in which latter enveloped in red-to-blue ombré glass, an unexpected gesture that adds a welcoming splash of colour in the otherwise monochromatic colour scheme.
The choreographed circulation of visitors around the central reflection pool is echoed by a sinuous flowing water channel that Ting describes as “a surging current in the calm water courtyard”. Beginning as a fountain, the channel spirals and twists its way across the vast pool before it disappears below the yoga space, coursing through the building’s foundation and finally emptying out of sight into the Yellow Sea. The stream’s ethereal sensibility is matched by the encircling “flower” wall, a lattice construction made with curved concrete blocks, and six trees that seem to grow out of the pool, a reference to a landscape painting by the Yuan dynasty artist Ni Zan – ultimately providing another facet in how the Museum has succeeded in paying tribute to both traditional Chinese landscape painting and zen sculpture gardens.
