ARCHITECTURE · CULTURAL BUILDINGS
Reading time: 10 minA 621 square metre building carrying 139,000 individually adjusted ceramic units is not a normal ratio of craft to floor area. The Jinling Diamond Art Pavilion in Nanjing earns it, because almost every decision in the building is a translation of something written down. The city’s ancient name produced the form. The title of the brief produced the surface.
There is a particular kind of building that gets described as symbolic and then never examined any further. A form is said to reference a wall, a material is said to honour a history, and the writing stops at the point where the design actually begins. The Jinling Diamond Art Pavilion, completed in Nanjing in 2024, has attracted a great deal of that treatment, which is a shame, because it is one of the more literal buildings of recent years. Two pieces of language went into the studio and two pieces of architecture came out, and the interesting question is what happened in between.
The practice is azLa, which stands for allied zhang and Lei architects, and the lead architects are Lei Xiaohua and Zhang Lei. The site is 474 square metres in the Jianye District, in the centre of a residential enclave of ten glass towers, and the building is 621 square metres over three levels. Almost nothing in that brief suggests a building worth travelling for, and yet it carries more considered detail per square metre than most cultural buildings twenty times its size.
The name became the shape
Nanjing was called Jinling, and the second character of that name, 陵, is a homophone of another character, 菱, which names the water caltrop. The water caltrop produces a seed pod with four points and a flattened diamond profile, and it gave Chinese its ordinary word for a rhombus: 菱形, língxíng. This is not an obscure etymology. It is the word a Chinese schoolchild uses in a geometry lesson. The building is a diamond because the word for diamond contains the city’s old name.
That would be a thin joke on its own, so the design goes looking for corroboration and finds it twice. In 1366, Zhu Yuanzhang began four concentric walls around the city, and the outermost of them, following the natural ridges of the terrain, closes into a rough diamond in plan. Separately, the best preserved of the old river houses along the Qinhuai, No. 61 He Fang, built by the Tao family in the late Qing, is diamond in its plan, in its flagstones and in its timber components. The shape has precedent at the scale of a whole city and at the scale of a floor tile, which is a reasonable licence to use it at the scale of a pavilion.
What azLa then do with it is the properly architectural move. The site sits at roughly twenty degrees to the street on its eastern side, the sort of misalignment most designers resolve by picking a side. Here the base is held parallel to the residential towers to the north and south, and the plan rotates as it rises until the upper volume sits almost parallel to the road. The building faces inward at the bottom and outward at the top. It is not a single-axis twist and not a stack of rotated plates in the usual sense, because the base is rectangular and the top is not, so the rotation and the change of shape happen at once. The surface that results is doubly curved, which is where the real work started.
One hundred and thirty nine thousand rods, and none of them is a brick
The facade is made of 139,000 custom ceramic units, each 60 by 60 by 180 millimetres, and coverage of this building has almost universally called them bricks. They are not bricks. A brick is a wall unit and it is laid; these are extruded rods and they are hung, which is a different discipline entirely. The distinction matters because the most repeated claim about the facade, that it echoes the scale of Nanjing’s Ming city wall, is the one part of the story that does not survive contact with a tape measure. A Ming wall brick is a heavy two-handed object, several times the length of one of these rods. Set them side by side and the family resemblance is not dimensional at all.
What is borrowed is colour and time. The colour is taken from a specific object, a city brick of the late Eastern Jin period held in the Nanjing Museum and inscribed with the character for stone, a reference to Shitou, the Stone City, which is another of Nanjing’s old names. The reddish tone of that brick is the tone of the pavilion. Under one third of the 139,000 units are glazed, and the glazed ones are distributed in a gradient that runs from the top of the building downward, so that the surface reads as unevenly weathered rather than uniformly new.
There is a quieter correspondence at work too. The bricks of the Ming wall carry inscriptions naming the people and places responsible for making them, a traceability system built into the material itself. A facade in which every single unit had to be individually set and individually angled is, in its own way, a building that knows where each of its pieces came from.
The trees are in the title, and in the glaze
In October 2023 azLa received a brief with a title rather than a schedule: The Renaissance of Jinling under the Sycamore Tree. English coverage has quoted that title and moved past it, which loses the second of the building’s two translations.
The trees in question are the London planes that line Nanjing’s older avenues, known locally as French phoenix trees. They were planted from 1928 under the city’s first mayor, Liu Jiwen, along the route prepared for Sun Yat-sen’s funeral procession to his mausoleum, and in the century since they have become the thing residents name first when asked what their city looks like. The phoenix in the local name is not incidental either. The classical line about the wutong tree holds that if you plant one, the phoenix will come, meaning that if you make the conditions right the good thing arrives of its own accord. A brief that asks for a cultural building in a district that is otherwise finished, in the hope that cultural life will follow, has chosen its title with some care.
The design takes that literally as well. The distribution of the glazed units across the facade was arrived at through simulation, and the two references fed into it were the uneven surface of the historic city wall and the pattern of light and shadow under a plane tree avenue. The gradient is therefore doing two jobs at once. Seen from a distance it is patina. Seen from close to, in sunlight, it is dappling. A facade generated from the behaviour of leaf shadow is an unusual thing to attempt on a doubly curved surface, and it is the detail that most repays standing in front of the building rather than looking at photographs of it.
The joint is where the design actually happened
Small buildings are usually where architects have the least room to hide, and this one is a joint drawing more than it is a form drawing.
Two fixing systems are used. The doubly curved surface at the main entrance carries prefabricated U-shaped slots with through bolts, aligned along the hyperbolic geometry. Everywhere else, on the flat facade planes and the roof, conventional prefabricated chemical anchors do the work. The curtain wall is assembled from linear units of roughly 1.2 metres, and the angle of every individual rod can be adjusted by a screw reached from behind. That last detail is the one that makes the whole surface possible, because it means the geometry does not have to be perfect in fabrication. It has to be correctable on site.
Then there are the meetings. Straight surface to straight surface, straight to curved, curved to curved, and the three-way conditions where two straights meet a diagonal, or a straight meets a diagonal and a curve. More than ten distinct joint types were developed to resolve them. Seven full-size mock-ups were built on site, partly to prove the details worked and partly to serve as a reference for the installers, which is a candid admission that no drawing set was going to carry this on its own.
On the most probable reading of the module, with the 60 by 180 millimetre face outward, those 139,000 units cover somewhere in the region of 1,500 square metres of surface. That is roughly two and a half square metres of hand-adjusted ceramic for every square metre of floor inside. Whatever else this building is, it is a serious piece of commissioning.
Inside, the twist becomes a room
The frame is steel, which is what allows the plates to move against one another without an armature of columns to hold them apart. There is one column, near the centre, and it holds up a sloping roof punctured by triangular rooflights that spread daylight fairly evenly through the section.
The ground floor is the exhibition level, given over to showing work by younger artists and designers, and it is finished in white marble with glazed ceramic rods carried indoors on parts of the walls. Bringing the external cladding inside is a small decision with a large effect, because it makes the wall thickness legible and stops the interior reading as a separate project. Above it, a staircase rises through a reading area arranged over two levels, occupying about a third of the building’s floor space. Below, the same stair continues down to a community hall considerably larger than anything above ground, lit through a sunken courtyard rather than borrowed light.
The result is that the twist is not only an exterior effect. Because the plates rotate, no two floors have the same plan, and the leftover geometry at the perimeter gives every level a differently shaped edge. A mirror pool at the base doubles the sculptural form in the immediate approach.
azLa is younger than its back catalogue suggests
The credit line on this project is worth reading properly, because the practice is frequently referred to by the older name and the older name belongs to one architect. azLa was founded in 2021 by Zhang Lei and Lei Xiaohua, with a stated interest in basic architecture and traditional aesthetics, and the projects that made the reputation predate the partnership.
Zhang Lei is one of the significant figures of the generation that built Chinese architectural practice out of the academy. He was vice dean of the School of Architecture at Nanjing University and now holds a chair professorship at the School of Design at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, alongside visiting posts at the University of Hong Kong, ETH Zurich and Chiba Institute of Technology. The work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, at Aedes in Berlin and at the Centre Pompidou. The buildings people know are the Concrete Slit House, the CIPEA No. 4 House at the Nanjing architecture park, the Kunshan Opera Museum and the Nanjing University Museum.
The one that explains this pavilion, though, is the BingDing Wood Kiln at Jingdezhen, a 2019 project that wrapped concrete arches around a working wood-fired porcelain kiln in a bamboo forest, with perforated screens of the same brick the kiln itself is built from. A practice that has already designed a building around the making of ceramic is not going to treat 139,000 bespoke ceramic units as a cladding selection. It is going to treat them as the subject.
What a 621 square metre building can carry
The pavilion belongs to Jiangnan Jiuxu, a residential development by China Overseas Property in the Hexi New City area, the business district that grew up in the run-up to the 2014 Youth Olympic Games and is now close to complete. The pavilion sits at one of the three points where the neighbourhood meets the surrounding streets, which is a deliberate choice: it is the piece of the development that faces outward.
What is encouraging is how far the client went with an amenity building, commissioning something whose entire argument is material and whose programme, an exhibition space for emerging artists, a library and a community hall, gives the surrounding towers something to gather around. In a district of glass, a small solid thing with a hand-set surface does a disproportionate amount of work. It gives the place a landmark at walking scale, which is the scale most people actually experience a neighbourhood at.
That is also the strongest case for the building as architecture rather than as symbol. The translations from language into form are elegant and worth explaining, but they are not what makes it good. What makes it good is that somebody drew ten kinds of joint, built seven mock-ups, and worked out how to let an installer turn a screw behind a ceramic rod until the light falls correctly across a curve.
Frequently asked questions
Who designed the Jinling Diamond Art Pavilion? azLa, allied zhang and Lei architects, based in Nanjing. The lead architects are Lei Xiaohua and Zhang Lei, with Li Zheng as project manager. The practice was founded in 2021.
Where is it? In the Jiangnan Jiuxu residential development in the Jianye District of Nanjing, within the Hexi New City area to the southwest of the historic centre.
How big is it? The site is 474 square metres and the building is 621 square metres over three levels, one of them below ground.
What is the facade made of? 139,000 custom ceramic units, each 60 by 60 by 180 millimetres, in glazed and unglazed finishes. Fewer than a third are glazed, and they are distributed in a gradient running from the top downward.
Why is it diamond shaped? The city’s old name, Jinling, contains a character that is a homophone of the character naming the water caltrop, whose seed pod gives Chinese its word for a rhombus. The diamond also echoes the plan of Nanjing’s Ming outer wall and the geometry of the old Qinhuai river houses.
When was it built? Designed from 2023 and completed in 2024.
Can you visit it? It serves the residential community it sits within, with a ground floor exhibition space, a library and a community hall below. Access arrangements for visitors are not published, so it is worth enquiring locally before travelling.
Final thoughts
The Jinling Diamond Art Pavilion is a building that rewards being read slowly, and it is unusually generous about showing its workings. The form comes from a word. The surface comes from a sentence. Everything between the two, the ten joint types, the seven mock-ups, the screw behind each rod, is the part that turns an idea that could have stayed on paper into something with a shadow.
It also makes a quiet case for the small commission. At 621 square metres there is no room for a weak elevation and nowhere to lose a bad detail, and azLa have responded by treating that constraint as the whole opportunity. In a district built at the scale of the tower, this is a building at the scale of the hand.
Leave a Reply