High in the mountains of Songyang County in China’s Zhejiang Province, where narrow winding roads give way to a 600-year-old village relatively untouched by the urban tide, TEAM_BLDG has staged a quiet architectural rupture. Their latest project, The Quartet – Songzhuang Z Museum, transforms a once incongruous 1990s brick-and-concrete house into what is described as China’s ‘first contemporary rural art museum dedicated to the theme of weaving’. And yet, this is less camouflage than re-orchestration. In Songzhuang Village, where most houses still bear the tactility of earth, wood and stone, The Quartet is a handsome anomaly. It is at once foreign and familiar, assertive and deferential. The museum does not disappear into the village, nor does it particularly dominate.

“Since the building’s incongruity with the village context was an established fact, instead of concealing or diminishing it, why not enhance this contrast in a way that is memorable?” posited Mountain Creations, the client. “At the same time, this contrast should be appropriate and graceful—resonating both with the spirit of an art museum and with the character of the village itself.” This line of thought became a design directive for the Shanghai-based TEAM_BLDG.

Considered for renovation on multiple occasions, the original residential architecture, blocky and unyielding, always stood apart from the surrounding low-slung rammed-earth dwellings. TEAM_BLDG began with a ‘deconstructive approach’: cutting into its mass, splitting the structure vertically into four volumes from the inside out, each interspersed with slender inner courtyards. This operation was as much subtraction as calibration, adjusting the structure’s scale and rhythm to echo the village’s fragmented grain. From this act of incision, the architects drew an almost musical metaphor. The ‘quartet’ of four volumes—linked by bridges, terraces and canopies—compose a ‘dynamic’ sequence of staggered heights. These rooftop levels do more than create visual variety; they stage moments of pause, vantage and congregation, subtly programming social interaction without prescription. The result is a structure that holds tension and release, form and lightness, in its very silhouette.

“To visually ‘lighten’ the mass of the original building, the architects took inspiration from traditional textile weaving”, the project’s description notes. If the cuts set the rhythm, the fine façade design sets the texture. TEAM_BLDG wrapped the museum in a diaphanous lattice of square aluminium tubes (20mm x 40mm), each painted white on one side and red on the others. These were arranged into irregular grids, denser above and looser below, guided like ‘warp’ and ‘weft’ across a loom. The structural elements behind serve as the loom; the façade becomes its fabric of woven, dual-coloured ‘yarn’.

With this, the building lightens, dissolving its mass into a shimmering, delicate veil. “Light and shadow begin to ‘weave’ across the façade,” the architects convey, the skin producing subtle chromatic shifts as sunlight traverses across the mountain village: a translucent pink under sun, a serene white in rain or snow. The Quartet is, hence, never the same twice.

The irregularity of the aluminium lattice is crucial for the art museum. Too strict a grid would have yielded a rational, mechanical order. Instead, the architects allowed gaps, variations and moments of overlap, particularly across terraces where the weave seems to unravel and recompose itself multidimensionally, “further amplifying the sense of ‘woven skin’”, as TEAM_BLDG puts it. In this, The Quartet resists total legibility, a fabric whose threads conceal as much as they reveal. The façade’s white-and-red slats perform differently in relation to time and weather: not only do they alter appearances through colour, but they also refract the mountains into patterned glimpses, turning landscape into a woven tapestry. The irregular spacing of the lattice doubles as ventilation, a functional weave that breathes.

The cultural building’s spatial choreography begins with contrast and spools into a ‘sensory transition’. Visitors first enter a dimly lit, earthen ‘prologue hall’ within an adjacent rammed-earth structure, its red-painted steel window frames and a traditional ‘tiger window’ acting as a modest prelude. Only after this hush does the main building open up: a vertical atrium carved through three levels, crowned by a serene skylight. This shaft of light, both functional and symbolic, connects the galleries of the Chinese architecture in plan and in section. It is the museum’s lung, its spine and its stage. From its edges, visitors can glimpse one another across floors, caught in a choreography of ascent.

“[To] give full focus to the artworks, the architects intentionally minimised additive interior design interventions, instead prioritising the clarity of circulation and the relationship between interior and exterior spaces,” the official release mentions. Each floor circles this luminous void, aka the ‘light well’, while windows are strategically reframed to ‘curate’ views of the surrounding rural village.

Some are compressed apertures, others expansive cuts, a strategy of ‘secondary framing’ that connects the inside and out, in tandem with repositioning the village itself as part of the museum’s profferings. On the third floor, large openings turn the stairwell into a semi-outdoor space, bridging architecture and landscape. Above, a rooftop terrace offers panoramic release: un-zoned, unprogrammed, it invites visitors to dwell in the openness of sky and mountain as part of the cultural architecture’s experience.

Within its 472 square meters, the museum architecture folds together an art gallery, café and shop. Here, the motif of weaving extends itself to the furniture designs: inspired by the forms of traditional looms, TEAM_BLDG conceived a bespoke series, aptly titled Loom, composed of 20 x 20mm square steel-tube frames wrapped in taut, 20mm-wide, custom red straps. The result is a set of table and chair designs that translate the façade’s woven logic into tactile, inhabitable form, a reminder that weaving is seen, as much as it is touched, sat upon, lived with. As the Chinese architects describe, the woven elements “extend the thread motif from exterior to interior,” collapsing boundary into tangible continuity, of threads solidifying into architecture and design.

Connectedly, the new intervention dialogues with the old rammed-earth residence. Rather than demolish, TEAM_BLDG allowed this modest structure to act as a threshold and foil, a counterpoint that renders the new all the more luminous, in this exercise of adaptive reuse. In this respect, The Quartet does not erase history but freshly braids it into the narrative of the present.

‘Believing ‘BLDG’ to be “a verb [rather] than the meaning of architecture... Relative to any concept or style, [we] are more [focused] on the ‘atmosphere’ of building and space,” the firm’s design for The Quartet – Songzhuang Z Museum suggests that architecture, when attentive, can operate as fabric: a warp of program, a weft of context, threaded through with time, weather and use. In this way, it is less a singular building than an ongoing composition, its threads shifting with every step of the visitor, every angle of the sun.

Project Details

Name: The Quartet – Songzhuang Z Museum
Location: Songyang, Zhejiang, China
Typology: Museum, café, store
Client: Mountain Creations
Architect: TEAM_BLDG
Design Team: Xiao Lei, Deng Caiyi, Shen Ruijie (architects)
Collaborators: CSC Communis (curatorial team); GongHe Architecture Design Group Co., Ltd. (structure design); TEAM_BLDG (custom furniture, lighting design, VI design)
Area: 472 sqm
Year of Completion: 2025