Christian Boltanski,The Heart Pavilion

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: A SQUARE CUT FROM THE SPACE-TIME RIPPLE OF HEART BEATING
At the end of 2018, we were fortunate to be entrusted by the Chongqing Lanba Art Museum to design a small museum exclusively collecting a contemporary work of art by Christian Portanski, a French national treasure artist, in Xiannushan mountain, Chongqing. This museum records human heartbeats, named THE HEART PAVILION.
The challenge of this project lies in how the architect maintained the uniqueness and creativity of the architecture, while retreating behind the artist's work to fully express and present the latter. We have always maintained close communication with Boltanski from site selection to design process, and The starting point of the architectural scheme is the architect's cognition and re-creation of the artist's work.
Several key perceptual cognitions formed the basics of this architectural work:
The first is that we hope people’s very first perception of the building is aural rather than visual.
The second is that The flat form of architecture comes from the meditative picture of the architect reading the work The Heart Archive : the time-space ripple caused by heartbeats.
The third is that the material of this building should be concrete. The power of concrete sinks and penetrates into the ground, just as Boltanski explained his creative experience: starting from suffering and facing death.

The HEART ARCHIVE & BOLTANSKI
Christian Boltanski was born in 1944 in Paris at the end of World War II. He is a famous French sculptor, photographer, painter and filmmaker. His father was a Jew, and massacre, despair, fate, and memory have always been the core of his work.
Because of Jewish identity, his father hid in the basement for several months during World War II. The shadow of war accompanied Boltansky's childhood and later, and prompted him to respond to the ultimate question of life and existence in the way of artistic creation.
Beginning in 2008, the 64-year-old artist Boltanski began to collect the heartbeats of people around the world and established the Heart Archive. So far, he has collected the heartbeats of 120,000 people. These heartbeats are stored in the Heartbeat Archive in Toshima, Setouchi, Japan, which is the first exclusive collection of Boltanski's work. The Heart Pavilion in Chongqing is the second one.
The most important space in the Heartbeat Archive is the installation Heart Room. An incandescent lamp hangs in the center of the Heart Room, strobing synchronously with the heartbeat of someone currently playing. In a dark space, with strobing light, heartbeats are magnified several times to be deafening. Boltanski hopes to summon people's perception of life in this way.

SITE SELECTION
The Heartbeat Pavilion project is an important sub-item of Lanba Land Art Season, which is located on a platform on the Fairy Mountain in Wulong, Chongqing. Lanba Art Museum and several small buildings are under construction at the same time. The site is backed by Monk Cliff with a vertical drop of 800 meters and faces the Wujiang Canyon.
Our work including selecting a site for the Heartbeat Pavilion. Out of the understanding of the artist's work, we chose a piece of land far away from the art festival tour line, located on the edge of the terrace. The site faces the gorge, with a panoramic view of the distant mountains and clouds. The base is separated from the main road by a large forest. During site selection, the idea of "opening the building with the sound of heartbeat" gradually formed. After communicating with the artist, the site selection was finalized.

SUNK INTO the MOUNTAIN
HIDEN BEHIND the FOREST
MEET THE MUSEUM with VOICE
We hope that the way the building opens is aural, not visual. The building is located on a hillside behind a woodland, sinks into the mountain, hiden behind the forest. A long arc-shaped path through the woods connects the building site and the main road. On both sides of the main road, there are heartbeats synchronized with the Heart Room. Visitors will first hear the heartbeat sound from the depths of the woods, and walk into the site along the direction of the sound. This is a ritual process in which the senses are constantly amplified. The architect expected to present to the visitors an aspect of the artist's work, not the appearance of the building. It is hoped that this process is not only of shaping the ceremony, but also of abandoning the preconceived visual form of visitors.

FROM EXHIBITION TO ARCHITECTURE
The Heart Pavilion is the successor to the Heart Archive in Setouchi. The function of the former comes from the layout logic of the latter provided by the artist. Our work is to explore the interesting possibilities of planes under the logic of this exhibition layout.
In the end, the plan combination of a group of circles gradually became clear. On the perceptual level, the plane form of the building comes from the imagination of the heartbeat: "the time and space ripples caused by the heartbeat". On the rational level, these overlapping circular rooms are divided into light and dark according to functional requirements, and complete a experience flow line that connected end to end.

PROJECT NAME: The Heart Pavilion · Wulong
LOCATION: Xiannvshan Mountain, Wulong District, Chongqing City
PROPROETOR: Chongqing Lanba Art Museum, and Christian Boltanski
ARCHITECTURAL AERA: 210㎡
SITE AERA: 390㎡
DESIGN YEAR: 2019.5
CONSTRUCTION YEAR: 2019.5-2020.1