Taken from the soil, reward to the soil
Forward
The sun shines upon the sand stone cliff, leaving a faint yellow contrasting the dark caves engraved in the past hundreds of years by hands. In face of the beautiful nature and historical richness, the Bamiyan Cultural Center is an attempt to praise what nature provides us: the soil that grows us food, a ground to stand on and a roof to rest under.
The Bamiyan Cultural Centre is a humble experience for the visitors to connect to the natural soil. Across the Buddha Cliff, Bamiyan Cultural Center symbolizes the 3 Bamiyan valleys, where different ethnical groups, of different culture and opinions will be welcomed and respected under one big roof.
Past to Future
Archaeological Significance
The design concept of the Bamiyan Cultural Center (BCC) originated from archaeological significance of the place. With a history that stretches over two thousand years, the silkroad hub was once a cultural and religion exchange center. To emphasize the uniquely Bamiyan identity, BCC is an attempt to make architecture disappear, instead of making architecture the identity.
Relationship to the ground
Afghan has a close relationship to the ground, which they rest, cook, and create artifacts from. The BCC is thus inspired to keep the relationship of the ground to the building, and pay special attention to the different character of mud to be applied to the construction.
Traditional typology
Pakhsa wall Qala compound is inspired the spatial organization of the BCC. The larger rectilinear periphery defines the building, while quarters are provided with courtyards that bring closeness yet still lively, and village like compound.
Rebuild Identity
In order to enable Bamiyan to move forward into the future, the Bamiyan Cultural Center plays an important role in rebuilding the identity of the place, of the culture, and the people.
The pressing issue is to create jobs that help to pull the people of Bamiyan out of poverty, which needs to begin with healing the harm done to their identity. Through educating the locals with their own historical uniqueness, facilitates researchers and archaeologists to research, as well as providing an exhibition hall that preserve and display their pride.
Meanwhile, the center will also provide ground to boost pride of their local culture, by providing space and assistants to artists and experienced craftsmen to train the next generation with their tradition, providing a well-designed auditorium for performance, lecture and conference etc.
The open park on the upper level will provide an open space for idea exchange between people of all culture and all opinions.
The Bamiyan Cultural Center will facilitate Bamiyan to search and recover her own identity that will lead them to a bright future.
Under the big roof
The qala compound is binded together with one roof, which flushes with the upper ground of the site, which together serves as a large park for the public.
The building is divided into 5 quarters, namely Performance, Exhibition, Educations, Research and Private. Each quarter has its own courtyard that is connected by a main passage throughout the building. Users will access each space through the courtyards, to encourage idea exchange and participations to different activities in the center.
The quarters and roof organization enables the building to be flexible in spatial arrangement as well as easy to be extended in the future.
20km production radius
The project aims at using material that can be found locally within 20km travel distance. Using locally founded material not only help to ease the limited transportation, but also help to create jobs and training needed for Bamiyan to progress forwards.
The BCC is a brick wall & structural concrete roof construction, together using pottery and fabric as the secondary façade and interior partition.
The building will be built mainly out of hollow brick, which has better insulation property while using less material. During the construction, locals will cooperate with NGO focusing on earth work, in order to train and improve building techniques. The brick wall weaving technique will create two types of masonry patterns: solid wall and light wall that allows low cost brick buildings to be well lite throughout the day.
Pottery has a long history in Afghanistan, of which has a unique turquoise color glaze above it. It will be used as a light shading device in the public area. The use of pottery is important to bring out the essence of Afghanistan culture as well as nurturing traditional craftsmen.
The traditional carpet is taken from local herds, carpet weaving has long been a natural self-sustaining products. It can be used as soft partition for space like workshop exhibition, conference room, which enhance the spatial quality, while empowering women with job and be self-sustainable.
Sustainability
Base on the limitation of the infrastructure in Bamiyan, the building design focuses local source building material and passive energy saving that maximize day light, encourage natural ventilation, using high thermal mass material, good insulation. The project also actively harvest solar energy, water collection/ recycle system.
In the building, each space has a light wall that is connected to a courtyard, providing natural lighting in the interior. A top opening is also installed in order to adjust opening for lighting and ventilation purpose
The hollow masonry is a good insulating material that is efficient in heat gain, along with the air gap of the brick wall. The bricks and the concrete roof have high thermal mass, that store heat during the day to keep cool, and release heat at night, keeping the interior temperature stable.
The depth of the concrete beam and the pottery lighting device controls the amount of sun light entering the building over different seasons.
Despite the precipitation is not very high, the building takes its topographical advantage by collecting rain water from the upper ground to the lower ground. Together with recycling grey water, the building will be able to reduce water usage.
Despite the recent solar farm installation in area, the north part of the site will have solar panel installed to harvest sustainable electricity.
Status: Competition Entry
