Xinxiang Cultural Tourism Center, lighting by PROL

Project name:
 
Xinxiang Cultural Tourism Center
Architecture firm:
 
Zone of Utopia/Qiang ZOU + Mathieu Forest Architecte
Location:
 
Xinxiang, Henan, China
Photography:
 
TOPIA Commercial Photography
Principal architect:
 
WU Di, WANG Zhang, Arnaud MAZZA, MA Jia, XUE Qijun
Design team:
 
Collaborators:
 
Interior design:
 
WUZ Design
Built area:
 
28200 m²
Site area:
 
Design year:
 
Completion year:
 
2021
Civil engineer:
 
Structural engineer:
 
Arup Group Limited
Environmental & MEP:
 
Landscape:
 
Hassell Shanghai
Lighting:
 
PROL, Li Hui , Fu Li,
Supervision:
 
Visualization:
 
Tools used:
 
Construction:
 
Material:
 
Budget:
 
Client:
 
Sunac China
Status:
 
Built
Typology:
 
Cultural › Tourist Center

The Fantasy adventure of Magic and The Frozen

Xinxiang, known as Muye in ancient times, is one of the important cities in the Central
Plains, facing Zhengzhou across the river. Besides, the 11th Cultural Tourism City built by
Sunac Cultural Tourism Group in China is located here.The huge-scale building sets like
ice cubes on the water and consists of three large clusters of 9 small cubes.

All of the lights here are designed by PROL, who further extends the design concept of
exploring the hidden value of light to work out the urban artistic landmarks in the Central
Plains, namely the winter wonders.
The inspiration of the Frozen

With the extreme use of light and shadow, PROL actively thinks about the arrangement
and combination of various lights, so that the designer breaks through the inherent form
of isolated ice box during the day, and magically turns the "big ice block" at night into a
romantic fairy tale, showing the diverse styles and infinite possibilities of architecture.

The lighting design is based on the intuitive feelings of the building and its relationship
with the building, through the reconstruction of the two concepts of ice and snow, so as to
achieve the effect of highlighting the shape of large ice cubes with the lighting.

The lighting is set to 3-5 times the overall brightness of the surroundings, gradually raising
and converging from bottom to top. Combined with the interesting association of Frozen,
PROL breaks through the traditional cold white color of ice and snow, allowing to radiate
more colorful lights to convey the romance, exquisiteness and joy of the ice and snow
world.

The alienation and closeness of urban architecture

The façade of the building adopts digital printing glass, which distributes color on white
ice cubes during the day, making the building look cool and stylish. Among the huge
cubes, the translucent ice crystal glass façade has a hidden visual effect that effectively
filters light and interior structure.
At night, the light turns the daytime cold ice cubes into a fantasy wonder fairy tales. The
visual atmosphere created by the light brings endless sense of surprise and desire to
explore.

Taking into account the placement of the lighting fixtures and the maintenance path of
the building's curtain wall, the designer tried his best to show all the details the lighting
could provide, and finally used the form of internal lighting to highlight the frosted glaze
on the digital printed glass. In addition, the designer restored the overall texture and
transparency of each Ice Cube by using layer-by-layer lighting, showing the coordination
and balance between appearance and formlessness, interior and exterior.

Given the effect of light transmission at night on the facade, the designer deconstructed
various patterns of frost condensation and external visual focal points from different
angles. Experienced designer has designed a large ice cube with uniform and smooth
lighting effects that are balanced inside and outside after repeated experiments.

The designer cleverly applied specific lighting colors to match the theme of Frozen. Not
only did he choose the blue and white tones that are inherent to the impression of ice and
snow, but also captured the blue and purple tones reflected from the ice flowers.

Dreamy and sweet colors flow slowly on the cubes, reflecting each other, which to some
extent highlights the theme of the founding of happy cultural tourism city.

During the lighting adjustment, are many children playing in the square, who are attracted
by the lights and stop to ask curiously if this is Princess Aisha's castle. The designer
suddenly discovered that the hidden value of light not only has intuitive visual beauty, but
also brings people an initial sense of touch and joy that has no boundaries or ages.

Let go of the rational design language, the glorious big ice block in children's eyes is more
like the ice castle raised from the ground by Princess Aisha's magical wave. It is also the
pursuit and thinking of adults for nature, joy, and fairy tales?

The clouds are scattered, the beautiful landscape. The ice is melting, with the water is
sparkling. The large ice block with great tension has become a new artistic landmark of
the city, standing quietly on the north bank of the Yellow River, bringing the beauty of
freezing in the extreme cold climate to the Central Plains. The PROL with the magic of light
and shadow, inspires the vitality and dream of the big ice building style which is different
from the daytime, and awakens the romance and touch of the fairy tale inside each one of
us.