Moganshan Liaoyuan Theater

A Theater Opens Slightly towards the Rural

Moganshan is one of China’s oldest and most renowned summer retreats. Since its emergence as a resort destination, its close cultural and economic ties with Shanghai have shaped a distinctive condition: traditional or modern, urban or rural, local or foreign, these familiar binaries have long been challenged in this remote valley of western Zhejiang. In recent years, with the completion of a series of new projects along Yu Street in Liaoyuan Village by Deqing Culture and Tourism, a local state-owned developer, such challenges have become increasingly intense and consequential.

A visible restructuring of spatial order is taking place in the village. At sunset, the locals walk their dogs along the newly landscaped greenway by the stream, while young visitors sit idly by the bridge at the village entrance. These new developments further blur the boundaries between urban and rural, tourism and local life, while establishing the conditions from which new forms of activity and content might emerge in the future. The theater is no exception. While its operation and programming are still taking shape, the design intention to soften the boundary between the building and its surroundings is already becoming apparent.

Yu Street, the main street of Moganshan Town in Liaoyuan Village, is lined with plane trees, cafés, and shops, giving it a streetscape strikingly similar to that of Shanghai’s Former French Concession. Following the stream uphill, the street continues to the former long-distance bus station dating from the early twentieth century, marking its longstanding role as an entryway to the mountain town. Yet this highly urbanized street frontage is remarkably thin. Through the narrow passages between buildings, one can see the mountain peaks rising on either side; the water’s edge is easily reached, as are the farmhouses and vegetable gardens just beyond the riverbank. The site of Liaoyuan Theater occupies one such irregular parcel along Yu Street, bounded by the street on one side and water on two others.

The everyday condition of a theater is not one of performances or festivals, but rather the closed state between events. In this dormant condition, a conventional theater often assumes a certain monumentality, respected and held at a distance.It symbolizes the collective anticipation of the next performance, translating that anticipation into a spatial presence that exerts control over the surrounding public space and, to a certain extent, the urban life around it.The design of the theater on Yujie therefore began by asking how it might respond to Moganshan’s particular urban condition, and how it might establish a form of monumentality, or perhaps non-monumentality, different from that of the conventional theater.

Based on this understanding, the theater's perimeter assumes a slightly open posture, probing the boundary between the building and its surroundings. The stepped terraces surrounding the building extend the site's hilly stream-valley topography, occasionally expanding into a series of amphitheaters. These paths continue through openings in the roof onto terraces and exterior corridors, continuously branching and converging.Through this process of wandering and exploration, the theater is no longer a clearly defined destination, but an unfolding journey.

This peripheral zone does not seek to blend into its surroundings, neither the urban streetscape nor the rural village. On the contrary, the building employs exaggerated scale, distinct geometric forms, and deliberate contrast with its surroundings to produce a spatial relationship defined by tension and theatricality. At the material scale, the louvered curtain wall, composed of silver stainless-steel tubes with elliptical sections, recalls the curtain of a traditional theater. Its mirrored surface, however, dematerializes the building's physical mass while simultaneously reflecting the surrounding mountains, stream, trees, and sky at distorted scales. The theater therefore retains a heterogeneous presence as a civic building, while placing that presence within an open, continuously negotiated boundary.

Theater never begins inside the black box. It originates in everyday life, where paths, encounters, pauses, and acts of looking form the conditions from which theater emerges. Between theater and everyday life there is always a boundary that remains blurred and open. What Liaoyuan Theater attempts to open is therefore not simply the perimeter of the building, but the possibility for theater to continue unfolding across the village, the surrounding landscape, and everyday life. 

Collaborators credits:

Construction Documents by CCDI Group

Photographer: Tian Fangfang, Zhu Yumeng

Area:

3,970 sqm