WH Studio Packs a Museum, Archive, and Planning Hall into One Courtyard Complex in Song County

How do you fit a museum, a city archive, and an urban planning exhibition hall onto a site smaller than 9,000 square meters? WH studio, led by Hui Wang, answered that question in Song County, Luoyang, by stacking programs into a cluster of pale limestone volumes organized around two courtyards. The result is Song County's first comprehensive cultural facility, and it manages to feel monumental without sprawling, with an above-ground construction area of 10,000 square meters achieved at a floor area ratio of just 1.14.

What makes the project worth studying is not just the programmatic density but the cultural logic that shapes it. The massing abstracts the Eight Scenes of Song County, local landscape motifs including mountain peaks and flowing streams. Glass roofs between volumes are conceived as water running down from hillsides. The ground floor pulls back to form a continuous colonnade whose column proportions reference Fujiezhouza, a classical Chinese bracketing pattern, with a width-to-height ratio close to √2. The building speaks two languages at once: contemporary civic architecture and regional tradition.

Massing as Landscape

Seen from above, the complex reads as a miniature topography. Stepped white volumes of different heights create a profile that deliberately echoes the Seven Peaks, one of the Eight Scenes of Song County. Between these solid masses, glass roofs trace the lines of streams. The duality of mountain and river is not a decorative theme but a generator of form: the solid volumes house enclosed galleries and offices, while the transparent gaps between them become daylit public halls.

The clustered arrangement also works pragmatically. By breaking the program into distinct but connected blocks, WH studio avoided the single-mass bulk that typifies civic projects squeezed onto tight urban lots. Each volume has its own scale relationship to the surrounding residential towers, and the courtyards between them let daylight and air into what could easily have been a deep, dark floor plate.

The Ground Floor Colonnade

The building's most emphatic gesture at street level is its setback. The upper limestone volumes overhang a ground floor wrapped in glass and structured by concrete-filled steel tubular columns, forming a continuous colonnade along two street frontages. The move converts a mandatory setback into an inhabitable threshold: shelter from rain, a place to pause, and a transition zone between the city grid and the building's interior courtyards.

The proportioning of these columns is deliberate. WH studio calibrated their width-to-height ratio to match classical Chinese architectural norms, specifically the √2 proportion found in traditional Fujiezhouza colonnades. It is a subtle reference, unlikely to register consciously with most visitors, but it gives the colonnade a visual rightness that purely structural sizing would not. At night, illuminated timber screens behind the glass walls turn the base into a lantern, its warm glow contrasting with the cool stone above.

Stone Surfaces and Horizontal Logic

The material palette splits cleanly along a datum line. Dark granite clads the gable walls and the colonnade at ground level, anchoring the building to its base. Above, light-colored limestone slabs take over, laid in three different sizes to emphasize horizontality and to introduce a natural, almost geological texture. The variation in slab dimensions prevents the facades from reading as wallpaper; instead, they suggest the stratified layers of sedimentary rock, reinforcing the mountain metaphor embedded in the massing.

Details like the diagonal bracing patterns visible in the upper facade panels and the lattice vent screens break the stone surface into readable episodes. Each facade has its own rhythm, responding to what lies behind it: archive storage demands few openings, the museum requires controlled daylight, and the planning hall calls for transparency. The material is consistent, but its deployment is anything but uniform.

Glass Roofs and Climate Control

The two glass-roofed halls are the spatial heart of the complex. Both open directly to the outside, functioning as semi-public covered courtyards rather than sealed atriums. The roofs use three layers of Low-E insulating glass with plated dots, a strategy aimed at reducing the greenhouse effect in summer while still delivering generous daylight to the floors below. Electric openable louvers sit beneath the glass, enabling natural ventilation to flush heat upward and out.

The courtyard layout itself is a passive strategy borrowed from local residential traditions. Song County's vernacular dwellings orient their main houses and flanking wings to optimize winter solar gain. WH studio translated that principle to an institutional scale: the courtyards channel light deep into the plan, and the stepped massing ensures that no single volume casts a permanent shadow on its neighbor during the heating season.

Interior Circulation and Atmosphere

Inside, the dominant experience is vertical movement through light. The main atrium is organized around a curved white staircase with integrated LED edge lighting, a sculptural element that guides visitors upward through multiple gallery levels. The beam string structure overhead keeps the ceiling slender and open, allowing the glass roof to feel close and luminous rather than heavy. White surfaces throughout the circulation zones amplify available daylight and give the interiors a gallery-grade neutrality.

Not every space aims for the same brightness. The timber slat wall in one hall introduces warmth and acoustic absorption, creating a distinct atmosphere suited to exhibition or event use. An interior courtyard centered on a single bonsai tree, framed by white walls and a skylight, offers a moment of stillness between programmatic zones. And the auditorium, with its red seating and linear ceiling lights, makes no apology for being theatrical. The building accommodates a real range of moods within a disciplined material vocabulary.

Urban Context and the Night Profile

Song County's new city district across the Yi River is defined by residential towers, the kind of context that often overwhelms low-rise civic buildings. WH studio's response is not to compete in height but to assert presence through luminosity. At dusk, the building's edges glow, the glass roofs become lit seams, and the colonnade radiates warmth. The night profile is arguably the building's strongest public face, making the cultural facility legible from the surrounding apartment blocks in a way that daytime stone facades alone cannot.

The landscaped perimeter of young trees and bamboo softens the transition between the civic precinct and the residential grid. From the aerial views, the complex reads as a deliberate void in the urban fabric, a low, luminous object surrounded by vertical towers. That contrast is its urban strategy: it does not need height to claim significance.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal how three distinct programs, the museum, the archive, and the urban planning exhibition hall, share service cores and circulation without merging into a single undifferentiated mass. The underground level is given almost entirely to parking, freeing the ground floor for public use. Sections show the beam string structure spanning the glass-roofed halls and the stepped massing descending to subgrade. The construction detail drawings of bracket connections are particularly telling: they document WH studio's effort to translate classical Chinese joinery logic into steel, a structural ambition that goes beyond stylistic quotation.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese cities are producing civic buildings at a pace that rewards spectacle over specificity. What sets the Song County Three-in-One project apart is its refusal to be generic. Every major decision, from the courtyard typology to the column proportions to the massing profile, is rooted in something local: the vernacular dwelling pattern, the classical proportioning system, the landscape mythology of the Eight Scenes. The building does not announce these references with signage or literal imitation. It absorbs them into a contemporary language that holds up on its own formal terms.

The pragmatic achievement is equally important. Fitting three public institutions onto a site this constrained, while delivering courtyards, a colonnade, and generous daylit interiors, required genuine design intelligence. WH studio demonstrated that density and civic generosity are not opposites. For a county receiving its first major cultural facility, that is a meaningful gift.

Three-in-One Construction Project of Song County by WH studio (lead architect: Hui Wang Interior). Located in Luoyang, China. 8,796 m². Completed in 2022. Photography by ZY Studio.

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