Memorials are for the living—a built reminder of lived realities that transcended time, and perchance, become larger than life itself. Here, one critical goal is to engage current and upcoming generations, relaying stories, residual grief, resentments as well as triumphs, all while honouring our ancestors. This architectural preposition is greatly emotional and evidential, as lasting reminders of wars, pandemics, natural disasters, civil unrest, or figures worthy of honouring. These are designed commemorative venues of how we choose to remember, as an essential exercise to reflect and learn from our past, and also, to honour those who've left marks on history. How else can memorials engage with the public while upholding their primal function, through their spatial programmes and intent?

In the Town of Xiajiaqiao (now known as the Xiaqiao Community of Lujia Town) of Kunshan in China, a now well-known figure was born into a wealthy landowning family. In his formative years, Tao Yiqiu rose to local acclaim through his beneficial endeavours geared towards the prosperity of his hometown. In 1939, he founded the first counter-Japanese armed force in Kunshan and sold his land to support the resistance. In reverence and recognition for Yiqiu's many contributions, a memorial hall was erected in his honour in Lujia Town, Kunshan, in enduring remembrance. Following the addition of an underground line to be built nearby in 2020, this memorial was then planned to be relocated to Xiaqiao Community, Yiqiu's birthplace. 

The new site, narrow and rectangular, sits tranquil in a semi-enclosed area in a relatively ‘messy’ surrounding environment. The client (Government of Lujia Town, Kunshan City) addressed rather simple requirements to Chinese architectural firm Atelier Deshaus, as long as the cultural building’s area would not exceed 1,000 sqm while accommodating a few small exhibits and two sets of sculptures from the current venue. The current building gathers under a solemn, almost plain design of pleasant geometries snuggled among three service buildings.

Akin to thin paper planes gently conversing with each other, the project’s new noticeable, horizontal design, gentle and unassuming, “regards the memorial hall as a place for the preservation and transmission of memory, and analyses Tao Yiqiu's life story based on ordinary humanity,” shares the Shanghai-based firm. “By creating a calm and restrained atmosphere, visitors can escape from the mundane surroundings and enter a world of peace. In the quiet place, between the transition of darkness and the flow of light and shadow, focus on gazing, listening, and contemplating, and quietly appreciate Tao Yiqiu's difficult situation and difficult choices among the multiple forces in troubled times. Memorising of the ancestors then triggers reflection on life,” they continue.

The current partners and principal architects of Atelier Deshaus, Liu Yichun and Chen Yifeng inculcate a moderate separation between the memorial building’s area and its surroundings with the two sets of walls of varying heights that grace the site’s perimeter. These also successfully exclude the service buildings from the visitor’s line of vision inside the introspective, uncluttered space. In contrast, the interior design of the Taoyiqiu Memorial Hall is segregated into five main themed exhibition spaces: the front yard, main courtyard design, front hall, exhibition hall, and the statue courtyard, all linked in sequence from the west to the east along the site’s depth the site, and “incrementally separating from the surrounding daily scenes,” the design team shares.

Following the spatial program, the memorial architecture’s visiting path reciprocates in an S-shape, meandering around the site’s main axis and elongating the visitor circulation within the limited area. “Therefore, the design can continuously transform the visual focus of each themed space through the turns of the path, and visitors can also perceive the theme space from multiple angles, both forward and diagonally,” the architects explain. Furthermore, the visual exits of each themed space establish visual paths separated from the visiting paths between different visual focuses. “In this way, the visitor's overall perception of the memorial hall is a diachronic and synchronic superposition of spatial and visual experiences,” the Chinese architects add.

The cultural architecture also utilises the site’s depth to accentuate its pronounced horizontality, while establishing its overall ‘visual tranquillity.’ According to Atelier Deshaus, it also “relies on the establishment and elimination of the frontage and symmetry of the building, the highlighting of the sense of volume and the elimination of the sense of heaviness, the amplification and compression of the architectural scale, and the tension between the ‘centripetality’ and discreteness of the themed space, to demonstrate how the memorial hall implies flow and slight changes in its basic formality and contains lightness and transparency in its moderate sublimity.”

The relocated, freshly established memorial design thus develops from a single, indoor exhibition hall full of ‘missionary meanings’ from its old residence to a quieter, more refined venue that engages with the open sky and grassy slopes, in its slightly ‘transcendent’ nature. Apart from its main function of commemorating ancestors, the contemporary architecture also invites the Xiaqiao Community as well as its visitors to embrace it as a meditation garden for contemplation. “As a result, the Tao Yiqiu Memorial Hall has transformed from a building that demands to be gazed at, to a place that allows viewers to gaze into their own hearts,” the principal architects describe. 

In honour of the legendary figure in the resistance against the Japanese aggression in Kunshan, the Taoyiqiu Memorial revisits and memorialises the lived reality of an influential, beloved human who kept the needs of his community at heart. The semi-enclosed Chinese architecture manifests as a ruminative, contemplative space in its considered starkness, its free-flowing insides, as well as its unadorned plain surfaces, a built paean to a memory preserved, maintained and passed down for generations to come. It is imperative to sustain such fibres of lived history and gain an understanding of what these spaces truly try to teach us. Such memorials, like many sustained ones, mark our consciousness and aid in community building, relaying what once was, and perhaps, prophesising what awaits—ultimately, feeding into each other.

Project Details

Name: Taoyiqiu Memorial
Location: Lujia Town, Kunshan City, Jiangsu Province, China
Gross Floor Area: 563.07 sqm
Year of completion: 2023
Client: Government of Lujia Town, Kunshan City
Architectural design, Interior design, Landscape design: Atelier Deshaus
Structure and M&E: AND Office, Tongji Architectural Design (Group) Co., Ltd.
Principal architects: Chen Yifeng, Ma Danhong
Design team: Chen Yifeng, Ma Danhong, Liang Jun, Du Shangfang (Architecture); Zhang Zhun, Chen Xuejian (Structure); Zhao Shiguang, Shi You, Jiang Haoqing, Wang Chenlu, Lu Hong (M&E)