“The Guardian Art Center is a lot more than just a museum,” says Ole Scheeren, principal of the eponymous Beijing practice Büro Ole Scheeren. The german architect has just completed a major project in the heart of Beijing: the Guardian Art Center, a custom-built auction house complete with museum quality galleries and state of the art conservation facilities as well as restaurants, a hotel, flexible event spaces, and integrated public transport infrastructure.

“It’s not a hermetic institution, but rather an acknowledgement of the hybrid state of contemporary culture. It is a Chinese puzzle of interlocking cultural spaces and public functions that fuse art and culture with events and lifestyle” says Sheeren. Built near the Forbidden City and the National Art Museum of China, the Guradian Art Center is a new hybrid cultural institution that balances between the traditional and the contemporary, a concept that is growing more prominent as China undergoes major urban development.

The Center will open its doors officially in May, when it will serve as the new headquarters of China Guardian Auctions, the first auction house to specialize in the selling of Chinese artwork and antiques. As an auction house, the hall is only active intermittently so the goal was to achieve a dense layering of functions. At the building's center is a flexible, 1,700-square-meter exhibition space with functions related to the auction house arranged around this central space. Above, stone pixels provide discrete spaces to accommodate the Center’s restaurants, administrative offices and a book shop. The glass ring atop the building houses a hotel, while a small tower inserted into the middle of the ring provides educational facilities for seminars and lectures.

As for the design, the Center's architecture "strikes a delicate balance of old and new and pays homage to its surroundings. The building’s lower portion is a series of nested stone volumes that echo the scale and materiality of the adjacent traditional hutong courtyard houses, while a floating glass ring above exemplifies Beijing’s status as a global metropolis." The upper ring is composed from window-sized glass elements in a brick pattern that reference the textures of the adjacent hutongs, while the lower stone pixels are perforated with a lyrical pattern of circular lenses that is based on an abstract painting by one of China's most celebrated landscape artists.

“Our architecture has reconciled the city’s complex narratives and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the historic and modern city with a building that reflects Chinese identity in a contemporary way,” says Scheeren. “The completion of the Guardian Art Center positions architecture together with arts and culture as essential to the city’s future.”