Located in the remote mountainous terrain of Zhejiang Province, The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum presents a compelling study of architectural adaptation, contradiction, and transformation. Situated in Songzhuang, a 600-year-old village that remained largely untouched by modernization until recent years, the project by TEAM_BLDG offers an architectural response that neither retreats into nostalgia nor imposes a foreign image. Instead, it constructs a spatial and material dialectic, acknowledging incongruity, emphasizing contrast, and subtly embedding itself into the evolving cultural landscape.
The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Technical Information
- Architects1-6: TEAM_BLDG
- Location: Songzhuang Village, Songyang County, Zhejiang Province, China
- Area: 472 m2 | 5,080 Sq. Ft.
- Project Year: 2024 – 2025
- Photographs7: © Jonathan Leijonhufvud
Better to stand out than to disappear.
– TEAM_BLDG Architects
The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Photographs
Reframing the Village Artifact
The project begins with a conflict: a 1990s brick-concrete residence towering awkwardly over the village’s low-slung, contiguous rammed-earth structures. Its scale and materiality severed it from the surrounding context, and it was long deemed a misfit within the village’s traditional fabric. Yet rather than camouflage its presence, the architects embraced its dissonance as a narrative condition.
Guided by the client’s directive to amplify, rather than suppress, the building’s incongruity, TEAM_BLDG approached the structure not as a problem to resolve but as a site of architectural inquiry. The question was not how to erase the past intervention but how to recalibrate it into a new typology: the rural museum. In doing so, the firm leveraged the tension between the old and new, not as a binary opposition but as an opportunity for mediation.
From Monolith to Quartet
The building’s spatial transformation unfolds through a deconstructive logic. The formerly monolithic mass was subdivided into four distinct volumes, a gesture that echoes the scale and fragmented rhythms of the surrounding village dwellings. Interstitial courtyards separate and unite these volumes, allowing light, air, and spatial rhythm to intervene in the once-heavy structure.
The design’s vertical core is a newly inserted light well. This atrium spans the height of the building, acting as a conduit for natural light while simultaneously connecting the interior’s horizontal strata. Circulation is organized around this vertical void, allowing for a fluid visitor experience that maintains visual continuity between floors. Each level wraps around the central shaft, reinforcing a sense of openness and transparency that contrasts with the building’s original opacity.
Visitors enter through an adjacent, preserved rammed-earth house that has been minimally modified to serve as a “prologue” space, a deliberate moment of compression and quietude before ascending into the brighter, open volumes of the main structure. This spatial sequencing, dark to light, low to high, becomes a sensory transition that enhances the visitor’s perceptual engagement with the museum’s content and context.
Weaving Lightness into Mass
The project’s defining material intervention is its façade, reconceived as a woven skin inspired by the techniques and metaphors of textile making. TEAM_BLDG wrapped the structure in a finely spaced lattice of aluminum square tubes, painted red on three sides and white on one. The resulting grid creates a dynamic interplay of light, shadow, and chromatic variation, responding to the shifting sun and weather conditions.
The design team intentionally avoided a uniform application. Instead, they introduced variations in spacing and density, especially across different levels and orientations. The upper portions of the façade are denser, while the lower remain more open, modulating both visibility and porosity. On the terrace, the façade becomes multidirectional, layering dimensional complexity and deepening the woven metaphor.
In bright sunlight, the façade takes on a soft pinkish hue; in overcast or snowy conditions, it becomes a subdued white veil. This chromatic fluidity imparts a temporal quality to the structure, each visit offering a subtly different impression of the building’s mood and presence. The weaving principle is further extended through custom interior furniture, constructed with woven red straps over slender steel frames, echoing the façade’s tectonic logic and material language.
Songzhuang Z Museum: Mediation Through Architecture
Rather than asserting itself as an icon or retreating into contextual mimicry, the Z Museum mediates between eras, materials, and scales. Its relationship with the village is neither submissive nor dominating; instead, it engages in a form of spatial dialogue. Reconfigured windows frame specific views of the surrounding village, allowing exterior scenes to interact with interior exhibitions. On the third floor, large apertures in the stairwell wall transform the space into a semi-outdoor condition, encouraging visual and behavioral connections with the outside world.
The rooftop terrace offers a final moment of release: an unprogrammed panoramic platform where boundaries dissolve, and visitors are immersed in the landscape. The architecture recedes, allowing elevation changes and open material transitions to a gently structured experience without overt control.
In an architectural climate often dominated by formal spectacle or overbearing contextualism, The Quartet – Songzhuang Z Museum proposes a third way, rooted in spatial logic, material clarity, and conceptual subtlety. It neither replicates tradition nor denies its presence. Instead, it proposes a weaving of time, space, and perception, where architecture becomes an active thread in the evolving cultural fabric of rural China.
The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Plans
The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Image Gallery
About TEAM_BLDG
TEAM_BLDG is a Beijing-based architecture studio known for its interdisciplinary approach and thoughtful transformations of urban and rural contexts. Founded to blend architectural experimentation with social narratives, the firm engages in projects of varying scales, from cultural institutions to adaptive reuse, often exploring the interplay between structure, materiality, and community. Their work is characterized by spatial clarity, contextual sensitivity, and a nuanced balance between bold formal gestures and understated detailing.
Credits and Additional Notes
Design Team: Xiao Lei, Deng Caiyi, Shen Ruijie
Structural Design: GongHe Architecture Design Group Co., Ltd.
Custom Furniture & Lighting Design: TEAM_BLDG
Visual Identity Design (VI): TEAM_BLDG
Client / Operator: Mountain Creations (山风大美)
Curatorial Team: CSC Communis
Photography Assistant: Wai Wai
- Altitude: Approximately 400 meters above sea level
