Location: Jinzhou, China.

Architect: CASANOVA + HERNANDEZ.

Mosaic Park in Jinzhou, China, is a 176-hectare public park that was created as part of the 2013 Jinzhou World Landscape Art Exposition. The park was designed by 20 international designers who were commissioned to create projects that linked the cultural background of the designers to the identity of the designs. The park is a hybrid landscape that combines architecture with landscape and nature with artifice. The irregular geometry of the park is spatially unfolded into a crackled three-dimensional topography, where landscape and architecture merge into a continuous surface formed by 884 irregular planes. The park is a mix of flowers of four different species and colours with mosaics created with broken pieces of local Chinese pottery. The building geometry of the Ceramic Museum is conceived as an extension of the crackled geometry of the park, and it is materialized using the same ceramic tiles used for the pavement of the park, which are combined in the building facade with glazed openings also following irregular patterns. The park and museum work as activators of public life by seeking to activate the use of the public space and the cultural and social life of Jinzhou. The Ceramic Museum is designed as an open structure, where the program evolves over time offering a new social platform to showcase the work of local artists, designers and artisans who work and experiment with the tradition of ceramic and porcelain. Ultimately, the Ceramic Museum aims not only to energize the public use of the park, but also the local economy and the cultural life of the city, in order to achieve a wider social impact, beyond its primary leisure purpose.

Photo credit: Ben McMillan.