Plat Asia reshapes a dormant lakeside building into a ridge like cultural landscape in China

On the lakeside edge of Lushan West Sea Resort in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, the Lushan West Sea Art Center reactivates a building that had sat unused for years, turning it into a compact cultural venue for exhibitions, salons, and events. Designed by Beijing-based PLAT ASIA and completed in 2021, the project began as a straightforward request to update the façade and interiors. Site analysis quickly pushed the scope outward, into a complete reworking of the grounds that brings architecture, landscape, and interior spaces into a single continuous experience.

The ambition here is less about adding program than about restoring atmosphere. The design anchors itself in the lake’s shifting shoreline, the soft rise and fall of the terrain, and the region’s visual memory. PLAT ASIA’s point of reference is the spatial logic of shanshui painting, where mountain and water operate as a compositional structure – layering distance, framing movement, and building depth through successive thresholds. From this reading comes the project’s central device: the Ridge.

A series of curled, ridge-like forms traces the site and folds into the ground, translating topography into an architectural geometry that can be walked. The ridges are not treated as sculptural add-ons; they act as organisers, setting up routes, pauses, and oblique views that encourage wandering rather than direct circulation. Their corrugated concrete surfaces sharpen this effect, catching daylight and artificial illumination so that shadow becomes part of the composition – an extension of the site’s textures rather than a contrast to them.

Interventions to the existing building are equally precise. A small western structure was removed to reopen sightlines and restore a clearer relationship between the volume and the landscape. Extensions to the east and west strengthen the building’s connection to the site, while the interior largely retains its original structure, supplemented by a cross-arch system that echoes the ridge language outside. New transparent façades make the art center deliberately permeable, allowing views to pass through galleries and public rooms toward the lake and horizon beyond.

In front of the building, a tiered waterscape works as a visual hinge between the architecture and the West Sea. It brings the presence of water closer to the threshold, amplifies depth, and subtly slows arrival. Light reflects and refracts across the surface and into the interior, reinforcing the project’s larger premise: that the visitor’s experience should feel continuous with the landscape, not set apart from it.

With a restrained footprint of around 600 square metres, the Lushan West Sea Art Center avoids spectacle in favour of calibration. By naturalising the site rather than overpowering it, PLAT ASIA turns renovation into a form of re-attunement where landscape becomes structure, structure becomes route, and the route becomes a quiet, sustained way of seeing, like walking through an unfolding shanshui scroll.

Project Credit

Project Name: Lushan West Sea Art Center
Location: Lushan West Sea Resort, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi, China
Architects: PLAT ASIA / @platasia 
Design Team: Donghyun JUNG, Guowei Liu, Jingyun Lian, Yuanyu Liao, Teng Xue
Site Area: 600 square meters
Completion Time: 05/2021 
Photo: Arch-Exist Photography; ONE THOUSAND DEGREES IMAGE
Video: PLAT ASIA ndn lab

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