UCCA Dune Opens: A Museum Dug Into the Sand at Aranya
OPEN Architecture's cave-like museum beneath a dune on the Bohai coast opened in October 2018, with ten galleries of hand-shaped concrete and skylights open to the sea and sky.
UCCA Dune opened in October 2018 on a beach of the Bohai Sea near Qinhuangdao, about 300 kilometres east of Beijing. The museum is a branch of UCCA, the Beijing contemporary art centre, and it is built inside a sand dune. From the beach, almost nothing is visible except a few openings in the sand.
The building
The design is by OPEN Architecture, the Beijing practice of Li Hu and Huang Wenjing. It consists of ten connected galleries and a café, each a rounded concrete cell of a different size, grouped like a cluster of caves. Some open to the sea through large windows. Others are lit only from above, through skylights that frame a circle of sky. A spiral stair leads to a lookout on top of the dune.
The shells were built by local workers, some of them former shipbuilders, who shaped the formwork by hand from narrow strips of wood. The architects left the irregular marks of the boards in the concrete. Sand was then returned over the roof, which insulates the galleries, and a ground-source heat pump handles heating and cooling. The project took three years.
Why under the dune
The dune was formed over thousands of years and stabilised by low shrubs. Along this coast, most such dunes have been levelled for sea-view property. Li Hu has said that if the museum had not been built inside the dune, the dune would be gone. Placing the building underground was a way to give the landform a use and so protect it.
Aranya
The museum belongs to Aranya, a seaside residential community that has become a subject of interest in its own right. Its developer commissioned a series of small cultural buildings from Chinese architects, among them the Seashore Library by Vector Architects, often called the loneliest library in China, and a white chapel on the sand. The place draws weekend visitors from Beijing who come for the architecture, for theatre and music festivals and for an idea of community life that is rare in Chinese resort development.
Visiting
High-speed trains run from Beijing to Beidaihe or Qinhuangdao in about two hours, and Aranya is a short drive from either station. The museum shows two or three exhibitions a year, usually of work made for the space, and tickets are booked in advance. Summer weekends are crowded; the beach in late autumn, when the galleries are quiet and the sea is grey, suits the building better.