TJAD and DCA Arrange a Huizhou-Inspired Art Museum on a Triangular Grid Beside a Hefei Campus Lake

University art museums have a strange double job. They need to work as serious exhibition venues, and they also have to sit on a campus as a teaching object, something students walk past every day and quietly learn from. The Art Museum of AHUA, designed by TJAD with Shanghai Daochen Architects (DCA) for Anhui University of the Arts, takes both roles seriously. The 9,314 m² building, led by architect Chen Qiang and completed in 2025, sits beside the central lake of the Hefei campus. It hosts exhibitions of visual art and serves as the university's venue for external artistic exchange.

What makes it worth your attention is the geometry. The plan is built on a triangular grid. It produces a hexagonal, almost star-shaped footprint, with pitched dark roofs that pinwheel around a central glazed skylight. The brief asked the building to carry Huizhou artistic and spatial traditions, and the obvious route would have been a pastiche of white walls and horse-head gables. The architects keep the vocabulary of Huizhou instead: pale walls, dark roofs, inward-looking courtyards, light falling from above. They then run it through a rigorous and slightly restless contemporary system. The result reads as regional without being nostalgic.

A Pinwheel of Roofs Beside the Lake

The aerial view at dusk tells you most of what you need to know. A cluster of pitched dark roofs spins around a glazed skylight, with ponds pressing in against the base and a lit road curving past. The massing breaks a building of more than nine thousand square meters into a family of smaller pitched volumes. That keeps it close to the grain of a Huizhou village rather than the scale of a civic box.

We think this is the project's smartest decision. On a campus, a museum this size could easily overwhelm the lakefront. Fragmenting it into roofs lets the building register as a settlement, and it gives the lake an edge that steps and folds instead of a single wall.

Render, Slate and Timber as Three Distinct Voices

The material palette is short, and every material has a job. White rendered volumes carry the Huizhou memory of whitewashed walls. Dark slate and grey stone cladding read as the heavier counterpart, the roof and the ground. Timber slats filter the windows, and rust-toned recesses mark the entrances. At twilight the glazed entries glow between these blocks, and you understand the facade as a collision of separate pieces rather than one continuous skin.

The stone-clad volume floating above a white wall, with steel stairs and a grated walkway pushing out over the pond, is where the composition gets most theatrical. Weight sits on lightness, and a dark mass hovers over water. It is a deliberate inversion of the grounded, tile-roofed house it references.

Lifting the Gallery Off the Ground

Several of the white volumes cantilever over an open ground level, with a spiral stair threading up through the void. The move frees the plaza beneath for circulation and shade, and it lets campus foot traffic pass partly under the museum. Seen through the weeping willows along the road, with a cyclist blurring past, the white gallery wall and dark slatted openings feel less like an institution and more like part of the daily campus landscape.

That permeability matters for a teaching museum. A building that students cut through or linger under is one they are more likely to walk into.

Slots, Bridges and the Logic of the Skywell

The triangular grid leaves narrow leftover spaces between volumes, and the architects treat them as the building's most dramatic rooms. A footbridge spans a slim courtyard between rust-brown walls with a young tree below. Looking up between panel and stone, you catch a glazed bridge crossing overhead. Elsewhere white walls converge into a V-shaped opening to the sky above a concrete stair that drops toward the water.

These moments are the clearest translation of the Huizhou tianjing, the small skywell that pulls light and rain into the heart of a traditional house. Here the skywell is no longer a tidy square. It becomes a sharp, angled slot, and the effect is more cinematic than domestic. It is still recognisably the same idea: an introverted building that opens upward.

Galleries Under Trusses and Sawtooth Light

Inside, the atrium is the hinge. A striped stair climbs beneath steel roof beams, and a glazed skylight throws hard diagonal sunlight across the white walls. It is a lively, almost graphic space, and it does a good job of announcing circulation.

The galleries themselves are calmer. Framed drawings line white walls beneath exposed dark ceiling trusses, and tall windows let a visitor glance outward. An upper corridor swaps white for a wood-clad wall hung with prints, behind a black steel railing. The exposed trusses are an honest choice for a university building. They show students how the pitched roofs are actually held up, and that is a quiet lesson in itself.

The Roof as a Public Terrace

A wide dark timber staircase rises between white walls and plywood-clad volumes. It carries visitors up to roof terraces that work as outdoor galleries of their own. A round timber planter holds a single tree, and wall openings frame the lake. A timber deck sits beside a skylight against a distant skyline of apartment towers.

That last view is telling. Hefei's new residential blocks are right there on the horizon, and the museum makes no attempt to hide them. The roof becomes a place to read the contrast between a village-scaled campus building and the city growing around it.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the system legible. The paired diagrams on the triangular grid show scattered wall lines resolving into a hexagonal arrangement of volumes and green courtyards. The site plans place the star-shaped ground floor against the water, with a triangular pool and planted terraces. On the ground floor, exhibition halls, storage and service rooms wrap triangular courtyards. Upstairs, galleries ring a central void, and an auditorium with tiered seating sits to one side.

The long section ties it together. It runs through a basement and two upper floors, under a sawtooth skylight roof, with a diagonal staircase slicing through. It explains where all that angled daylight in the atrium comes from.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese architecture has spent two decades negotiating how to reference regional tradition without sliding into theme-park imitation. The Art Museum of AHUA offers a useful answer. Treat tradition as a set of spatial relationships rather than a set of shapes. White and dark, mass and void, the closed wall and the open skywell: TJAD and DCA keep those relationships, and they let a strict triangular grid generate everything else.

The project is not without risk. The angular geometry produces leftover corners that will test curators, and the restless roofscape occasionally competes with the art. But for a university of the arts, a building that argues openly about its own heritage is the right kind of teaching tool. Students here get a museum, and they also get a working example of how a contemporary practice can read the past critically.

Art Museum of AHUA by TJAD and Shanghai Daochen Architects (DCA), Hefei, China. Area: 9,314 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Qingshan Wu.

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