The Visitor Center is the centerpiece of a comprehensive development initiative for White Crane Lake. The challenge for the designers was placing a stylistically modern cultural building aimed at increasing tourism, in a natural environment defined by its quiet ambience. The project had a multitude of functional requirements to fulfill, while balancing the need to elegantly coexist with a landscape of forests, mountains, and the lake itself. When the architect Jin’ang Yang was first formulating his design approach to the project, a simple solution would have been to take the materials and forms of the existing local houses in Jiangxi – and then abstracting and translating that language, essentially reinterpreting traditional architecture with a modern approach. However, considering that the building’s program requires nearly 3,000 square meters of area, it was quickly acknowledged that the appearance of a new, large-scale traditional Chinese-style building on the water's edge would be visually disturbing and incongruous with the nature surrounding it.