L’Avventura designer James Lee has revealed the inspiration behind his work on Grand Bay View Hotel Chengdu, a 50,000m² property in southwestern China.
Lee has revealed how his primary inspiration was drawn from a poem of the Tang Dynasty, named ‘Rainy spring night’. Using interior spaces and design as a metaphor for the poem’s imagery, Lee’s design language serves to demonstrate how literature can be carried through into physical spaces. The poem itself, written by Du Fu, reads:
Good rain knows the season when spring comes.
With wind the spring rain sneaks in night. Silently, it moistens everything.
The wild path is dark with clouds, and the river boat is bright with fire.
When it is dawn, the damp soil will be covered with red petals, and there will be countless colourful flowers in the streets and alleys.
A poem which explores the personification of the weather through the seasons, and concludes with a peaceful scene of the city covered in morning dew, the piece has been cited as the designer’s primary inspiration for Grand Bay View Hotel Chengdu’s design. “The research and execution of the project started with a poem and moved toward spatial design and artworks,” L’Avventura designer Lee explains, though “there isn’t a clear boundary between the two.”
The poem’s transition from night to morning is mapped throughout the hotel’s spaces, for instance through an entryway which progresses from darkness to light. The ceiling of the arrival lobby is made of bronze, adorned with an etching of an ancient city map, while a boat floating at the end of the foyer represents the river boat described in the poem. Thousands of white, ceramic flowers, painted and made by local artist Jing De Zhen, have also been pinned to canvas on the wall behind the arrival lobby’s concierge.
Left with the question of how best to incorporate the poem’s metaphor of wind into the hotel’s design, Lee opted to use bamboo leaves made of bronze to tell the wind’s story in the hotel’s courtyard. A woven bamboo lantern, meanwhile, found at the base of the stairs between the ballroom and the church acts as a ‘wild’ guiding pathway.
