A tribute to tradition

Eight parabolic brick vaults form the Imperial Kiln Museum. It is dedicated to the porcelain history of the site and is located next to the ruins of the Ming Dynasty imperial kiln. Designed by Studio Zhu Pei, the cigar-shaped buildings vary in height, length and curvature, emulating the traditional shape of porcelain kilns. 

The barrel-shaped buildings are arranged side by side in a slightly higgledy-piggledy cluster with a north-south orientation. This ties them to the city’s street layout while providing natural ventilation for the museum during the hot summer months. The building ensemble consists of two ground-level and five underground exhibition halls. Walking from Imperial Kiln Relic Park through the woods and over a bridge between two shallow pools of water, you reach the museum’s foyer. Behind it are more exhibition halls and courtyards, each with a separate theme: gold, wood, water, fire and earth – all the materials needed for porcelain production. Other vaults contain the museum offices, an auditorium, a café and a tea room.

Daylight is directed through the courtyards into the basement levels. On the upper floors, light falls through the glazed or open ends of the buildings, through horizontal light slots above the floors and through skylights in the ceilings that resemble typical kiln smoke holes. When furnace ruins were discovered during construction, one of the vaults was cut open in the middle to integrate the historical sites.
 
The masonry construction is also based on traditional kiln-building methods: as in ancient times, the vaults were constructed from double-shell brick walls without using scaffolding and then filled with concrete. A total of 2.8 million bricks were used – a mixture of new and reclaimed bricks that were left over from the demolition of old kilns. This is because porcelain kilns are demolished and rebuilt every two to three years to preserve their thermal properties. This system of reuse has a long tradition in Jingdezhen. Bricks from demolition sites are found in many buildings in the city and now also in the Imperial Kiln Museum.
 
The recycling concept, careful handling of the site’s heritage and the complex spatial design combine to make this project spectacular. It offers everything required of a public space and was not only awarded the prize in the Sharing public spaces category, but also the Grand Prize of the Brick Award 22.