-
Architects: B336 Design Group
- Area: 205 m²
- Year: 2018
-
Photographs:Eric Zhang, Jiaxi Zhao
Text description provided by the architects. Time Story is a narrative space designed for Red Wall Café on Jing Shan Xi Street, Beijing, by B336 Design Group. During the design, we extracted five scenes From Beijng native’s homes, and hoped the color and other elements from these scenes would rouse the inner memories from everyone, then to construct an image world overlapped with themselves and external environment.
Red Wall Café locates in the west side of Jing Shan Xi Street, in where the native people has lived for decades, even generations, and they remain living the old way. After the last street remediation, many stores except Red Wall café were removed, it became the only business place on the street, stopped in the old times with the surrounding residents to witness the red color of Jingshan yard wall and the tourists come and go.
Chinese people share the unforgettable memories of home and life from the last century, through extracting and collaging from these memories, our design team created five home scenes for Red wall Café, which are Combine-unit, Yard, Livingroom, Closet and Greenhouse. These five scenes are independent and separated from each other, but when it comes to their corresponding dining room functions, they are correlated to each other.
Scene I, Combine-Unit: Reception Desk and Bar Counter
Combine-unit in almost every 1980s’ Chinese family is the main image of reception desk and bar counter. This ‘furniture’ in the central region features oversized proportions, scales and dark composite wooden material. Around this Combine-Unit, people could reach to the three main dining areas in the dining room.
Scene II, Yard：Dining area
Yard is part of the three main dining areas which looks on the street. Our design team uses Siheyuan (traditional Beijing Courtyard) as image, creates a semi-outdoor space with the original glass window and a new skylight, a space in where could looks up at the sky and a space of red, the color comes from the Jingshan yard wall outside the window as a salute to the traditional colors, and also promotes the space extend outward visually.
Scene III, Livingroom & Scene IV, Closet：Dining area
The design team uses living room in 1980s and closet in today as space images for the other two dining areas. These two areas are connected in space and overlapped in color, their comparison leads to dislocation of time and mutual hint in space.
Scene V, Greenhouse：Passageway
In the passageway to the roof, the design team uses plants in the Siheyuan as space image to construct a Greenhouse scene. As the transitional space from indoor to outdoor, the greenhouse helps to create echo between the old time and the new in terms of spatial nature and visual perception.
