LILING WORLD CERAMIC ART CITY

Maria Gelvi

Archea Associati’s well-known design for the Liling hospitality complex and ceramic museum features sinuous shapes and iridescent colors. This unexpected city of art is right outside of an industrial area, featuring an enveloping site plan and inviting, sculptural structures. The design’s generative power is its ability to forge a dialogue between nature and artifice, innovation and tradition, which are all recurring features of Archea’s designs.
The ceramic’s beguiling polychromes become the elevations’ “manifesto of action.”
The buildings are like unexpected stage backdrops that find their place in an atmosphere that mixes the allure of the past with original facade textures and treatments, plunging visitors into a completely new landscape. 

The complex is divided into two main areas, one public and one for production, which are placed to the center and sides of the system, respectively. The square is the complex’s true living heart from which the diverse hospitality functions branch off including two calligraphy museums, a ceramics museum, a hotel, a restaurant, luxury residences, commercial services, and a roof garden, reached on a lift system.
The buildings’ arrangement on the ground and their entirety recall some of Giorgio Morandi’s compositions. Through the use of a podium concealed underground, these “vases” — autonomous yet in relationship to each other — offer the public different ways of using the space in the alternation of closed and open, dense and less dense, areas, creating an identity typical of historic Chinese cities.