A striking new visitor center has been completed at Wudang Mountain in Shiyan, Hubei Province, China, designed by Moguang Studio to serve as a multifunctional public facility for a planned guesthouse district in Longwanggou Village. The 450-square-meter structure, finished in 2024, integrates dining, café, kitchen, and meeting functions within a bold concrete form that responds to the challenging terrain adjacent to the Danjiangkou Reservoir.
The project emerged from an unusual source of inspiration when architects Li Jiaying and Feng Xin encountered a temporary blue corrugated barrier erected by contractors during the winter of 2023. The barrier's dramatic cutting across the slope evoked the land art installations of renowned artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, leading the design team to conceive the building itself as a linear intervention in the terrain that simultaneously abstracts distant views while functioning as an inhabited gallery space.
Budget constraints became a creative catalyst, prompting the architects to use 150mm-wide prefabricated wooden planks as concrete formwork. This innovative approach produced surfaces with strong grain patterns, rhythm, and directionality that effectively soften the abstraction of the concrete volume. The resulting texture creates a tactile quality that bridges the gap between the building's geometric severity and the organic landscape surrounding it.
Three strategically positioned light courts punctuate the solid concrete form, each carefully aligned with circulation routes to maximize both functional and experiential benefits. The most dramatic of these is the "Vertical Light Court," a 7.5-meter cube that connects the restaurant, kitchen, and meeting room horizontally while creating a vertical link between occupants and both sky and ground through constantly shifting daylight patterns. This interplay of light serves to modulate visitors' perception of both space and time, fragmenting the architectural experience into a series of memorable moments.
To achieve the desired sense of suspension and create large-span, column-free interior spaces, both the roof and ground slabs feature ribbed concrete construction that forms a sophisticated three-dimensional tubular structural system. Structural loads are efficiently transferred through end staircases, side walls, and strategically staggered partitions to a robust raft foundation. Long vertical windows, paired with motorized openings at both ends of the building, provide essential cross-ventilation while visually reducing the apparent mass of the structure.
The building's most striking feature may be the ultra-thin mirrored water surface installed on the roof, which creates a dialogue between the geometric precision of the architecture and the organic textures of the surrounding mountain landscape. This reflective pool serves both practical and poetic functions, echoing the distant reservoir while providing visual relief from the weight of the exposed concrete beams that integrate the building's MEP systems.
Construction required exceptional precision, with the entire concrete shell cast in a single continuous pour. Both roof and floor were designed with slight camber to balance structural forces and ensure long-term stability. The result is a building that reads simultaneously as an inhabitable gallery space and a geometric bridge—an architectural intervention that thoughtfully responds to the artificially altered terrain while asserting a quiet but confident architectural order within the surrounding wilderness.
Floors throughout the facility are finished with epoxy in a tone carefully matched to the concrete, reinforcing the material unity that defines the project's aesthetic. This attention to detail extends throughout the building, where every element contributes to a cohesive vision that transforms a simple programmatic requirement into a sophisticated piece of landscape architecture that enhances rather than dominates its mountain setting.
