China’s leading art academy was given a campus in dark grey brick, arranged as courtyards. Then it put a museum by Arata Isozaki in the middle of it.
At a glance
The Central Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest and most prominent art school in China, works on a campus at Huajiadi in the Chaoyang district of Beijing. Its buildings are dark grey and laid out as courtyards, designed by Wu Liangyong, the architect and planner who shaped much of post-war Chinese thinking about building in cities. The CAFA Art Museum, by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, was completed in March 2008 and opened that October for the academy’s ninetieth anniversary.
Key facts
- Campus: at Huajiadi, Chaoyang district, Beijing
- Campus architect: Wu Liangyong; the buildings are dark grey and courtyard-planned
- CAFA Art Museum: designed by Arata Isozaki
- Museum completed: March 2008
- Museum opened: October 2008, for the academy’s 90th anniversary
- Predecessor gallery: the CAFA Gallery at Xiaowei Lane, Dongcheng district, renamed the CAFA Art Museum in 1998
- Design teaching: revived in 1995 as the Department of Art Design, becoming the School of Design in 2002
- GPS: 39.9825, 116.4578 · Open in Google Maps
History
The academy belonged for most of its life to central Beijing: its gallery was at Xiaowei Lane in Dongcheng, in the old city, and was renamed the CAFA Art Museum in 1998. The campus at Huajiadi, out in Chaoyang, is the later arrangement, and it was built as a piece rather than accumulated.
Wu Liangyong designed it. He is the figure in Chinese architecture who argued hardest, through the decades when Chinese cities were being rebuilt fastest, that new building should take its rules from the old courtyard city rather than from the international tower. A campus of grey courtyards for the national art academy is that argument made at full size.
The museum came later. Arata Isozaki’s building was completed in March 2008 and opened in October of that year, for the ninetieth anniversary of the academy — an anniversary which dates the institution, not the campus, to the first years of the Chinese republic.
Grey
The colour is the decision. Beijing’s old city is grey: grey brick walls, grey tile roofs, the colour of the hutong before anything was painted. Building a new campus in dark grey brick, in courtyards, in a district with none of that left, is a statement about continuity made in the one material that carries it. Isozaki’s museum was designed to sit with those buildings rather than against them.
What you see
Dark grey masses around courts, and among them a museum of curving grey-slate surfaces. We have not seen the campus ourselves and are describing it from the sources named below, which is why this section is short.
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Sources & resources
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