Pugongshan Geology Museum

Press Kit

Unique Properties

Pugong Mountain in Henan Province is a limestone mountain. Local residents built hundreds of small lime kilns to produce lime and get rich quickly, but the environment was severely damaged. The site is now abandoned.
In order to promote the concept of sustainable development, we designed the museum by transforming the kiln head into a viewing platform, and using one of the old kilns as the main entrance of the museum, making the mine, the old gypsum kiln and the new museum an organic whole.

Dimensions & Packaging

The museum has 4 floors, divided into 1 underground floor and 3 above ground floors, with a height of 13.5 m, a land area of 14,159.5 square meters, and a total construction area of 3,314.5 square meters.

Tags

Museum, Combination of old and new, Ecological Education, Recycled Materials, Spirit of Place, Modest Construction

Production Technology

The building is constructed by local workers, some of whom are descendants of the lime kilns built in the past. We used the most common local technology to build this museum. The building skin is recycled from discarded concrete, with human-scale textured hanging panels, emphasizing the architectural The affinity with people also emphasizes the environmental protection significance of using recycled materials.

Design Challenge

There are two challenges in this project: 1. The owner thinks it is unnecessary to keep these dilapidated lime kilns, the owner thinks they are ugly, and they have to spend more money to strengthen them for the safety of tourists; 2. Compared with the model of simply building new houses, The model of merging old and new buildings presents design and construction challenges.

Research

The Geological Museum mainly displays the production process of lime and the destruction of the ecological environment caused by the disorderly production of lime, and plays a role in popularizing scientific knowledge of lime and ecological education.
We set several key mining areas in the original mining area as ecological education points, and set viewing windows and viewing platforms at the corresponding positions of the museum building, so that the museum building is tightly anchored in this special place.

Inspiration

The jagged stone hills and huge mine pits are a meaningful ecological education place in themselves, because the existing lime kilns are tools for people to make money and destroy the environment. Therefore, the inspiration came from the experience of going to the site for the first time: we persuaded the owner to keep part of the incomplete mountain, the mine pit and all the lime kilns. Our design strives to make these site elements become part of the museum and anchor them in the site.

Project Duration

The design of the project began in 2018 and was completed in 2020 in Pugong Mountain,Xixian County,Henan Province,China.

Operation Flow

In order to carry forward the concept of sustainable development, we combined the new museum with the existing lime kiln, using uncalcined limestone as a landscape element, using the continuous old kiln group as the iconic gate of the geopark, and the kiln roof was transformed into a viewing platform . In order to highlight the old lime kiln, we deliberately weakened the shape and color of the museum, "hidden" it behind the old lime kiln, and "pressed" part of the exhibition space into the ground, making the height of the museum lower than the old lime kiln.

Image Credits

Image #1#2#3#4#5: Photographer Yilong Zhao, Pugongshan Geology Museum, 2021.