Construction is off to a great start on the museum! The site looks like a hurricane hit it though! I feel like the contractors are sort of missing the whole concept of order and harmony. I've had some difficulty in the past working with my construction crews, I sure hope this isn't going to be a rerun of the bank tower in Hong Kong.
The gardens are being started now too and my team has been working day and night to find the right materials for them. Scholarly rocks are difficult to find in the shapes and dimensions we planned for, but when one is found its, so far, been worth the effort!
A truck delivering supplies to the museum site.
The landscape around the site have been causing some difficulty in maneuvering building materials. A few months ago we started work on the man made rivers and ponds surrounding the site. These have so far turned out perfectly but have been causing a great deal of difficulty for the construction crews. In order to move large and heavy building materials around the site we've had to create several makeshift bridges, a few of which have collapsed the canals they were built over. Every site has it's unique problems and this is looking to be our biggest one. As much as the ancient ways want the everyday people to journey through their art, my construction crews are finding it difficult to take a journey with several hundred tons of steel, wood and stone.
We've decided to finish the building in a "traditional" white stucco which is a common site around Suzhou. Since the government of the city asked for the museum to be a modern version of the existing Suzhou style, copying the colors of other buildings in the area seemed appropriate. The overall style of the museum is a bit radical for the area though. They wanted modern, they got it! But its all about moving traditional Chinese artwork forward! It really is amazing though how easily the modern style was able to encompass traditional design elements. In the end the building should look undoubtedly Chinese but definitely not ancient. I'll explain more of the parallels with pictures of the completed structure.
Not too much else to show right now, just a lot of mud and power tools. I'll post again soon. Hopefully we'll have made some good progress by then and I'll have something to show.
Some of my actual sketches for the museum. These are just some rough brainstorming, the first one was even done in crayon!
-I.M. Pei
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