We were deeply shocked the first time when we met the original building. The abandoned 3-storey archaized building stands quietly in the middle of busy urban road/ commercial space in the north and lively Dawang temple/ public plaza along the canal in the south, cutting off any connection in between. The interior was dominated by rough concrete structure and walls added from different time, which block most of the natural light, so the interior was mainly hidden in darkness. There are a series of courtyards in the 2nd and 3rd floor，surprisingly bringing some light in to create some dramatic moments, which is the unexpected highlights of the building.
Article source: neri&hu design and research office
Situated in close proximity to Yangzhou’s scenic Slender West Lake, the site given to Neri&Hu to design a 20-room boutique hotel was a challenging one, dotted with small lakes and a handful of existing structures. The design brief called for the adaptive reuse of several of the old buildings by giving them new functions, while adding new buildings to accommodate the hotel’s capacity needs. Neri&Hu’s strategy to unify these scattered elements was to overlay a grid of walls and paths onto the site to tie the entire project together, resulting in multiple courtyard enclosures. The inspiration for the design actually originates with the courtyard house typology of vernacular Chinese architecture. As with the traditional courtyard, the courtyard here gives hierarchy to the spaces, frames views of the sky and earth, encapsulates landscape into architecture, and creates an overlap between interior and exterior.
Located in the ShiQiao garden in Yangzhou, a city to the northwest of Shanghai, there is a floating Bamboo Courtyard Teahouse designed by Chinese architect Sun Wei, partner of HWCD. As an international design practice with offices in Shanghai, London and Barcelona HWCD has developed a broad variety of projects, specialising in boutique hotels, residential and mix-use developments. HWCD’s projects try to emphasize the existing “worldwide interconnectedness” of the architecture and design spheres by bringing together traditional Asian aesthetic and a more modern design language.
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