Six Buildings Around a Square

The Cultural Centre is defined by four roads rather than by a building. It occupies the whole area bounded by Youyi Road to the east, Longchang Road to the west, Leyuan Road to the south and Pingjiang Road to the north, about 900,000 square metres in total, and it is described as the municipal administrative and cultural centre of Hexi District. What stands inside that boundary is a group rather than a monument: the Tianjin Library, the Tianjin Museum, the Tianjin Art Gallery, the Tianjin Grand Theatre, the Tianjin Youth Activity Centre and a shopping complex. A city that builds its cultural institutions as a single walkable precinct is making a decision about how they should be used together.

The centre is recent and its construction is documented in stages. It was built in stages from 2011 and put into use in May 2012. Its institutions are older than their buildings: the Tianjin Museum in the centre is a comprehensive museum of history and art whose origins trace back to the Tianjin Museum founded in 1918, so a collection assembled over a century moved into a building a few years old. The new Tianjin Library was designed by the Pritzker laureate Riken Yamamoto, and the revised central urban plan brought the Cultural Centre and its surroundings into the city's main centre alongside the Xiaobailou business district.

The centre's position follows the government. In 2010 the Tianjin municipal government moved its seat from Heping District to Hexi, and the sources list the government, the Tianjin business district, the Friendship Road financial street, the Cultural Centre and the Meijiang area as lying inside the same district. That clustering is the reason a visitor to Hexi can walk from a concert hall to a museum to a municipal office without leaving a few streets. Metro lines 5, 6 and 11 stop at the Culture Centre station, between Xinanlou, Tianjin Hotel and the Cancer Hospital, which makes the precinct one of the best-connected points on the network.