The project site is located in Qianliang Hutong, Longfusi Street, an old downtown area within the Second Ring in Beijing, China. It is adjacent to famous urban landmarks in Beijing such as Jingshan Park, Beihai Park, National Art Museum of China, Beijing People’s Art Theatre. Originally built in the Ming Dynasty, Longfu Temple was a prosperous area where commercial atmosphere meets art activities until it experienced a fire accident in 1993.
“Inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day… the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes, elevated or on ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places.”
PINZHEN GALERIES, formerly known as Huaxia Pawnshop, is a jewellery, and luxury goods distribution and service platform with a history of 25 years and a wide range of businesses including pawning, retail, appraisal, maintenance and other services. It is a new retail form advocating a more sustainable product circulation lifestyle. The original brand image resembled a pure Chinese style and was familiar to and well-received by many consumers. Through the brand upgrade, the biggest challenge was to inherit the traditional elements from the brand’s past, and combine them with a new contemporary and international image.
Client is a tech company that occupies an entire office building. The office building rooftop has great corner views, either to the city or to the mountains in the background. A rooftop house is built to take advantage of this as well as providing a home like space for staff members.
Against the background of National Stadium in Beijing, 10 dwelling houses are established in a community called HOUSE VISION. Curated by Kenya Hara, it invites corporates, architectures and designers to work together to offer such life sized houses that would be manufactured in the future.Concept house design has been an expressive form of envisioning future human living. These 10 houses are collaborations with companies in the fields of energy, mobile vehicles, logistics, telecommunication, material, data, AI as well as sharing economy, all of which relate closely to house.
The apartment is located in the north side of Beijing and occupies the last two floors of a townhouse. The house is around 300 sqm and has as special feature a big rooftop terrace.
In the first floor the design aimed to open the entire floor to a big living space. The existing staircase had been demolished, partition walls had been removed and several structural walls had been perforated to improve the movement between different functional areas.
The space is zoned by build in furniture, creating rooms without the need of solid partition or doors.
Self-directed learning is thriving in the prototype learning landscapes at the Western Academy of Beijing. Rosan Bosch Studio has replaced the school’s traditional classrooms with an open community structure that enhance student agency and support project-based learning.
The designs present differentiated and variable spaces that support the school’s FLoW21 targets for team-teaching, flexible learning groups, mentorship and individualized timetables.
In my city, time is running backwards; dead trees are awakening in spring; all the disappeared smells, sounds and lights are recalled. The demolished siheyuan, hutong and temple are restored to their original appearance. The tiled roofs are like sea waves running to the low-rise skyline. Pigeons are whistling in blue sky; children are familiar with the changes of seasons, and residents stand firm in faith.
When it comes to Beijing, most people will immediately have a map in their minds, on which arrays of boxy buildings are closely packed. If viewed from the perspective of clouds, the capillary-liked alleys are the soul of this capital city: that is hutong. Despite the rise of reinforced concrete structures, hutong still exists and records the trivial daily life of common people in the city with its leisurely image, holding the city’s most original memories.
The project is an extension designed to host private residential spaces as well as spaces for a local artists community. The intervention connects and mediates the presence of two existing volumes; it grows around the two separated units generating different light conditions, fusing in a non-linear sequence the existing programs and the “new”, which comprises of creative disciplines such as sculpting, painting, pottery. The volumes weave around in their bare materiality enveloping more private and secluded spaces, interiors that are of three types: meditation, rest and discussion.
The renovation project is located in a huton within a core old quarter of Beijing. It’s a small Siheyuan (a typology of traditional Chinese residence) with three courtyards, with a total length and width of 15 and 42 meters. It’s named as “Qishe” (“Qi” and “she” respectively refers to “seven” and “house” in Chinese language), because its address number in the hutong is 7 and it originally consisted of 7 pitched-roof buildings. The Siheyuan before renovation was old and dilapidated. The basic wooden beams and some arched door openings featuring the style of the Republican era were relatively well preserved, while most of the roofs, walls, doors and windows were badly damaged or disappeared. In the three courtyards, there were many temporary architectural blocks inserted many years ago. After demolishing those blocks, the yards were filled with waste of construction materials and overgrown with weeds, presenting a bleak view.