It looks like an alien ruin, but it’s actually a cultural centre in the Mongolian steppe

On a boundless, windswept plain on the shores of Lake Laoli, in the Ulanqab Grassland of Inner Mongolia,  Chinese practice BUZZ — Büro Ziyu Zhuang has designed two enigmatic and highly evocative buildings that break free from the usual linguistic codes of vernacular rhetoric or ecological mimicry — so common in natural settings — and instead call for a rethinking of the relationship between architecture, context and temporality. The project consists of two paradigmatically opposed structures that stand in the landscape like artefacts of an archaic civilisation or alien fragments landed from an unknown space.

Designed to host exhibitions, meetings, performances and collective events, Prairie Ark is a horizontal mass set into the earth like a UFO that has belonged to the place for centuries or is about to rise and take off again. The sloping profile transforms the topography into an architectural promenade, guiding visitors upwards through a sequence of terraces to discover new perspectives on the vast open space of the prairie.

The entrances, without a hierarchical order and scattered across the basement, ground floor and roof, dissolve the concept of a threshold by blurring the boundaries between the building and the landscape. Inside, the space opens up into a unified, fluid and flexible setting, where natural light streaming through a grid of skylights at the top creates shifting patterns of light and shadow throughout the day.

While Prairie Ark is a semi-submerged, horizontally stretched mass, Nomads’ Beacon Tower represents its vertical counterpoint, reaching towards the sky like a beacon. Inspired by the smoke rising from signal fires and the watchtowers of the Great Wall, the structure stands alone on a small island along the eastern shore of the lake.

During the dry season, a path leads to an open-air theatre and a gathering space organised around the central core, from which a staircase leads to the top, face to face with the immensity of the steppe; in summer, when the water level rises and the path is submerged, the tower transforms into an outpost accessible only by water.

Rather than finished buildings, the two works appear as waiting entities, shaped by deliberately undefined programmes and by time, which will leave its inexorable marks on the concrete surfaces: a radical approach that rejects rigid authorial signature within the natural flow of transformation and places the project in a Middle-Earth suspended between idea and matter, past and future, in a condition of continuous possibility.