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Architects: O-office Architects
- Area: 353 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Siming Wu
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Lighting Design Consultant: HAD Lighting, Tian Huan, Hu Yankai, Tang Wei
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M&E Design Consultant: Buncong M&E Design Consultant, Tang Guanghua, Wen Dongjie, Luo Ziwu
"Old" here is both an adjective and a verb. "Old Church" is an event about time construction. The "Old Church" is the first realised public building of Arana Jiulong Lake Comminity in Huadu of Guangzhou. The original site of is a simulated church building of a "European Town" theme park. The building locates on the south-east conner of the town and faces the mainentrance of the community. Arana hopes it will become the first spiritual symbol for the community. The original building can be regarded as a local projection of the West, and its construction began roughly fifteen years ago. How to resolve the dislocation between the history reflected by the image and its construction history has become a speculative issue in the "Church" renewal project. Therefore what the church needs to construct is not space, but time.
The design of "Old Church" is not a conventional "renewal" of old buildings, but an "older" rebirth of existing buildings. At the beginning of the design, we tried to find clues of time and past stories on the site. The falling of the tiles and the traces left by the southern climate on the building gradually opened up the opportunity for design retrospection, and gradually laid the basis for what we call "demolition art".
The process of reconstructing the old church is actually a rigorous and sophisticated process of dismantling and "relicization": the finishing materials are carefully peeled off artificially from the building surface, and the reinforced concrete (modern construction technique) slabs of the roof are also finely cut and dismantled, allowing the building to present a more essential and natural state rooted in the soil. Several banyan trees that coexist with the church around are also retained as an organic part of the common original state of the site.
The clearly visible stone arch windows on the facade and the special rock and soil texture with the stripped finish tell the story of the building’s past. The demolished remains are also collected and piled up into the "relic garden" next to the "old church", making it a contemporary natural site of essence. Old building materials, such as rubble and granite gravel, are also mixed to the concrete of the new indoor and outdoor prefabricated floor panels as aggregates of the past and the present.
In order to establish a spiritual connection between space and nature, the earth and the sky on the above-mentioned building dismantling site and material re-contexture, we implanted a multiple "cross" steel-wood installation hang by the original concrete roof structure to shape the light and shadow of the high-angle subtropical sun in the open site of the church, and this mottled light and shadow reflects the changes and agility of Lingnan region. The Westernized site space is localized here, and thus enters a scene of multi-temporal and spatial cultural interweaving.
People walk into the site garden outside the church, pass through the walls after stripping off the decoration, enter the open interior of the building (or the outside of another world), look up at the sky, and feel the sunshine and rain in the south through the cross weaving... The old church is therefore reborn.
