Vanishing orders and appearing freedom.

Balance between the nature and the artificial.

Dialogue between the stage and the life.

Integrating experience to landform into body.

01 / Theatre in Nature

Yada Theater locates beside Yangxian Lake in Yixing, Jiangsu. It neighbors Yixing Bamboo Sea Resort, surrounded by bamboo. Yada Theater is one culture landmark in Yada Yangxian Xishan, also one of the most important comprehensive space to watch performances for 5000 households in the Town.

The design aims to create a landmark public activity space featured openness and integrating natural ecology and humanity characteristics into it. Architects tried to explore a new type of space for performance watching and create a Theater in Nature, displaying the magnificent appearance and natural experience in the architecture in a balanced manner.

△ Real Scene of Main Façade of Yada Theater

02 / Two Clues of Design

Tow clues of design during the design process are what the mountains need and what the audience need. That means architects do not regard functional demands, such as performance, watching and supporting services, as the exclusive principle of space management, but try to integrate body experience and landform characteristics into it to forming a complete space order.

△Lines follow the landform. Light cover creates flowing underlying space.

Based on this strategy, boundaries inside and outside of the Theater are translated into several open yards. Part of outdoor corridor connects them into a free pedestrian system. Design of lines follows the landform, remaining the original slope of the mountain to the most. The limited coverage creates light and flowing underlying space, being a media by which human could be in touch with the nature.

Generally speaking, the underlying pedestrian system creates a series of sceneries, which makes pedestrians walk through the artificial buildings and natural environment. The stereotype could be traced back to Chinese classic gardens. The connotation echoes with the oriental value of nature. From the aspect of humanity, the architecture is not an unbreakable substance but a micro-nature integrating into the landscape. More broadly speaking, relying on a complete and clear volume, the architecture becomes a magnificent culture landmark. Longview emphasizes the dissociation of volume to highlight the nature. Nearby view brings the geometry to integrate into the natural landscape. The artificial and the nature carry out an active dialogue and interaction at different levels.  

03 / Stage, Community, Nature

Performance watching is a kind of Gentrification activity in the traditional sense. It has specific form and etiquette and offers services to limited groups and requires professional venues. During the design of Yada Theater, architects expected to create a culture venue belonging to residents in the Community and enabling diversified public exchanges to happen naturally.

One of design strategies is to remain the transparency from the Theater inside to external environment. The main stage of the Hall innovatively uses 21-meter high French window glass as the background, facing the landscape. It enables the shift of two kinds of stage patterns. The transparency introduces the natural scene into the stage, creating a romantic experience of watching performance in the mountain forest, suitable for the concert. In the pattern of picture frame, the curtain could be dropped down, meeting customized setting requirements for opera and drama.

Due to the altitude difference of the original landform, 530 seats echoes with the external pedestrian system, being the extension of the mountain experience. In virtue of refined acoustic engineering design, the featured hall is suitable for different activities, such as small-scale concert, drama performance, meeting report and film. In the public service area, distance-friendly mountain yards become good choice for residents to play, have social contact and rest.

△Profile of stage of Yada Theater

From both function to emotion, Yada Theater is qualified to “Cultural Living Room” and creates dialogues and tension between diversified community life and well-ordered stage culture.

04 / The Bamboo Theme

Yixing enjoys exceptional advantages in nature resources and humanity tradition. It is well-known for bamboo sea and ceramics capital at home and abroad. Bamboo and ceramics culture offer great inspiration to the design. The internal uses the theme of bamboo. The material of hall wall comes from bamboo. The material is made by natural fiber and can be produced into plate and bamboo stick and many forms. It is environment friendly and beautiful. Architects designed random longitudinal texture, implying bamboo forest to awaken up the audience’s emotional resonance.

The suspended ceiling uses bamboo-texture metal preformed units. Traditional bamboo weaving texture offers inspiration. Adopting geometric elements and designing topology graph enable simple but refined visual effect.

In the basic tone of bamboo, partial dark weaving texture metal plates and golden line decoration add space layering. The design of architect, interior and landscape are designed by goa. The design of lighting, façade and other ad hoc design in the fields of stage, lighting and acoustics are under the unified management of goa. It is a brand new and significant trial.

△ Suspended Ceiling Module and Interior Façade Texture

05 / Celestial Blue Pottery Plate Experiment

With the theme of ceramics, the external façade of Yada Theater uses the ceramics plates produced in Yixing. Celeste glaze has the sheen of cream. With the change of natural light and view distance, the architecture shows subtle and charming change of color.

Architects bravely chose many kinds of ceramic plate textures, including wide and narrow vertical bamboo textures and plain texture. All plates are customized in the size of 750mm x 1800mm. The method introduces unified mapping logistic. By collage methods, the sense of substance was disappeared and the visual layering becomes refined and enhanced.

The specially designed bamboo texture is to integrate classic sense to the modernity of the building. The rib-line among grooves and the simple and smooth geometric façade bring out the best in each other.

The ceramic material is fired by natural clay in high temperature. It can be recycled with good environment friendly property. Smooth and compact surface has good self-cleaning ability, which could reduce the maintenance cost during the operation.

06 / Epilogue：A Stage in Forests

What does the mountain forest need? What do the audience need? Architects expect Yada Theater to be the home connecting human and nature. Here, residents could slow down to feel the change of sunshine, rain, snow and seasons and the beauty of art and life. As the cultural living room receiving every resident warmly, Yada Theater is not only an attractive stage, but also an audience gazing at the residents and the nature.

△ General Layout

△ Profile Map 1-1

△ Profile Map 2-2

△ North Facade

Project Info

Add: Wuxi, Jiangsu

Design/Completion: 2018-2021

Floor Area: About 4940㎡

Image Copyright: goa, Aogvision

(Source: goa)