Though the height difference between the north and south of the site reaches 18 meters, the designers didn’t adopt conventional treatment of cutting the higher area and filling lower area. Instead, they took mountain as design element to create a 4-storey building, thereby responding to the site elevation. The designers explored new spatial experiences by integrating the architecture with mountain. Erected on the mountain, the basic volumes of the building are overlapped in a staggered manner, just like rough mountain rocks.

Terraces are set back floor by floor, appearing like terraced fields fusing with nature. This not only adapts to the topography and site conditions, but also takes advantage of the concepts of mountain rocks and terraced fields to create an aesthetic “art gallery”, generating a lightweight architectural form that stretches horizontally. The negotiation area is a double-height space. There are two connecting passageways which add intriguing division and variation to the space, acting as “bridges”. The “bridges” help partition the space, while also reducing the excessive spatial scale.

Travertine, the major material characterized by unique texture and even, elegant grain, endows the building with a distinctive artistic ambience. Laid in a horizontal and staggered manner, it helps generate an elegant image at close view as well as a delicate mottled visual effect at distant view.