Hitel Hotel / Devolution

Curated by 韩双羽 - HAN Shuangyu

Architects: Devolution
Area: 3000 m²
Year: 2018
Photographs:Xiaodong Xu

Text description provided by the architects. HITEL is a small design hotel located in an emerging cultural and creative district in Xiamen.（Originally built in the 1980s, Xiamen Huamei Cigarette Factory）. The client hopes to increase the space and fun of public activities in addition to meeting the functions of the hotel within the budget, and it is different from the style of the design hotel that has risen in these years.

Because the predecessor was the reception center of the Huamei Cigarette Factory, the original layout of HITEL was set according to the functional requirements of the factory reception center，transforming it into a hotel requires facing practical problems such as single internal movement or insufficient lighting. But it also provides a lot of imagination，during the initial survey, we found that there are still some large pipes in the interior. The internal space is like an abandoned laboratory. The facade made up of a cylinder and a cube is not true in the science fiction movies of the 1980s and 1990s. Sense of scenery, so we originally imagined how to further enhance this unreality when we originally designed it.

We inserted 16 pipes with a maximum diameter of more than 1000mm inside the building, some of which penetrated all floors, causing the most unstructured damage to the building.

Hitel Hotel / Devolution - Interior Photography, Table, Windows — public area. Image © Xiaodong Xu

On the one hand, these pipes introduce light into the interior of the room, solving the problem of daylighting in the central windowless rooms; on the other hand they are a kind of damage to the conventional spatial logic, causing some obstacles and game feelings on the secondary line.

As a result, HITEL, which uses a considerable amount of aluminum plate and fluorescent coating, not only provides a comfortable environment, but also creates a sense of unreality in the future of Low-Fi.