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Architects: Basic Architecture Studio
- Area: 117 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Xiaodong Xu, Zhen Shen
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Lead Architect: Zhen Shen, Zhenzhen Chen
Text description provided by the architects. The courtyard is located in the south of Houhainan and the Xiaoxiang Fenghutong to the north of Gongwangfu. It is less than 100 meters away from Houhai. It was originally an abandoned courtyard with a better pattern and not very dilapidated architectural appearance. There are two main rooms and one west chamber, one in the east, and one kitchen built later.
On the right side of the entrance to the courtyard is a big tree. As long as you step into the entrance, under the protection of "she", there will be no more bustling in Houhai. Immediately, you will fall into a quiet atmosphere. In addition, with the strong color of the house, a strong sense of history will arise spontaneously.
We decided not to destroy the basic pattern of the courtyard, but to reconstruct the space and transform the function through a limited design and intervention, and more importantly, to continue the sense of history while excavating its potential cultural value.
The renovated courtyard consists of two guest rooms, a public kitchen and a Zen teahouse (old and new). The external facade extends the color and detail of the original house in addition to the additional part. The original window type, window sill and other elements are disassembled, distributed and reorganized, and new texture is mixed to form a new building facade. In the small courtyard, big trees and tea rooms form the core of the whole courtyard.
Through a continuous turning shape, the entrance, tea rooms and big trees are integrated to form porch, southeast corner tree courtyard and tea room space. Corroded steel plate and anticorrosive wood board are selected as two materials with a sense of time precipitation, which correspond with the main body of the building in color and atmosphere. They are the combination of the old and the new. A transparent and ceremonial gesture speaks of a kind of "courtyard public life" different from the Western Street square: a kind of public life with the theme of closeness to nature.
Knot in the world, without the noise of cars and horses. The core idea of Chinese ancient man-made gardens in the Ming and Qing Dynasties was to build mountains and forests close to the city. This was also a haven for the scholar-bureaucrats to temporarily relax and relax in dealing with the chaotic world. The yearning for nature was one aspect of the deep dualistic value of our soul and played a very good role in regulating people's minds. However, the standardization and fast pace of commercial society have gradually alienated us from nature and gradually lost this regulatory mechanism.
The courtyard itself is very close, in the limited space, through combing and integrating the different organizations and definitions of the traditional material "tile" to create landscapes and visualize landscapes. The transformed courtyard itself becomes a "place" in this city. It makes people forget the disturbances in real life and temporarily return to a more natural life state in an alienated way, or to comfort the soul. It is our expectation.
Architecture is like utensils. It takes time to nourish and fade away the dryness. It needs the embellishment of life to glow slowly. Looking forward to the spring blossom, the sun shaded by leaves, the pond full of water and the mossy days in the coming year, it should be another scene.
