Structuring enclosures. Design enhancement for the cultural system of the Small Wild Goose Pagoda area in Xi'an

The design is located in Xi’an (China), and it is centred on the protection and enhancement of an urban block corresponding to the An Ren Fang belonging to the Tang era. Nowadays it is characterised by an area of ??archaeological and historical interest including the remains of the Tang wall and the complex of temples on the axis of Xiao Yan Ta Pagoda.

Based on the presence of archaeological remains and on the iconographical study, the project enhances the historical palimpsest, re-reading the pagoda compound through two types of "inhabited wall”. The first one follows the placement of the remains of the walls that enclosed the Tang block and consists of a didactic pathway above them. It is strengthened in the south part by a residential and commercial front, designed according to the traditional dense urban fabric made up by courtyard houses, which redefines the boundary of one of the Tang roads that subdivided the city into a modular grid. The other inhabited wall instead is a city-scale building, a heritage center, that defines the eastern boundary of the system reinterpreting the theme of the sequence of enclosures, pavilions and gardens which lined the perimeter of the Pagoda. In this sense, the building can be seen as the Chinese combination of a series of volumes of a smaller size and symbolising the walls. These walls enclose large rooms which instead represent the pavilions. Finally the part of the garden is reinterpreted as a continuous green corridor meandering through the volumes. This configuration challenges the twofold side of the building acting both as a limit, and as a diaphragm and filter between the pagoda and the urban contemporary reality, for which it aims to be a starting point for an overall regeneration. It consists indeed primarily of public functions (museum, library, theatre) on the underground floor and of services, offices and public facilities both for the city and the Pagoda on the ground floor. In this sense the building combines two different functions and scales: the cultural one, which corresponds to bigger and hieratic spaces, and the one of the district services, with more measured and intimate spaces. The main pavilions reinterpret in their inner space the theme of different types of Chinese roofs within the traditional city, characterised by a unitary typo-morphological feature where the dominant element was the system of the court and the roof itself, which in our design is reversed and it is seen from below.