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Interior Designers: Atelier TAO+C
- Area: 42 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Fangfang Tian
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Manufacturers: FINE LUMENS, Magis, Modernica, edimass
Text description provided by the architects. Located on the ground floor of an old garden house, it’s a U-shape room with a full-faceted semi-circular window facing the back garden. Like many other 1930’s houses in French Concession in Shanghai, the house was originally built and inhabited by one bourgeois family, then was distribute to several families. Each family occupied one room and share the common kitchens and bathrooms on the other side of corridor. After many years of living together, people find the poor hygiene condition and lack of privacy getting more and more unbearable and moved out the house one after another in recent years. The 42sqm room was once the ballroom of the house and then a couple lived in it for decades, eventually moved out when they getting old.
How to revive an original single function room to meet new need of living is a problem faced by many vacant rooms as such. In this project, Atelier tao+c seeks to explore the potential of living in a single room within an outdated house, for young couples to live together but didn’t deny the possibility of being alone.
The architect inserted a huge composite piece of furniture or a micro “furniturisation” architecture into the room. With the original wall, windows and ceiling intact, a geometric volume constructed of maple plywood occupies large part of the room, forming a free-standing internal structure. Built into the depth of the volume, embedded all functional requirements – accommodating shower, kitchen, closets, bookshelves, steps and conversation pits. Through a intense carving out of volumes and a densely layered composition, creates different niches, nooks and divides up activity spaces - dining room and living room.
The top of the “furniture” serves as the secondary floor, which accommodates the private spaces. The mattress is embedded in the plinth to form the bedroom; the desk is stretched at the corner to define the study. By opening up floor partially, formed the conversation between two levels. Two different paths enhanced the connection - a wooden staircase leads from the living room to the bedroom, and a thin metal staircase that connects the study to the dining room.
The rich interface formed by the interweaving of concrete blocks absorbs the surface and plane of daily life into complex structures, thereby obtaining a looser space for activities. A 42sqm room results with a living room in 11sqm, kitchen and dining room in 20sqm, a bathroom in 4sqm, a foyer with wardrobe in 5qm, a bedroom in 15sqm and a study in 4sqm.
There is no partition wall in the room, light is brought deep into the room. The ground floor paved with red tiles which is commonly used in parks in Shanghai, extending from the outdoors to the interior create a continues landscape of indoor living.
In this project, the function of walls and floors was replaced by furniture, which became a reduced kind architectural miniature.
