丨中国丨FAR WORKSHOP

Architects:FAR WORKSHOP

Area:500m²

Year:2024

Photographs:Biosphere

Lead Architects:mangyuan wang

Category:Houses

Architects:mangyuan wang, Yang Yang, Rui Li

Structure Designer:Bai Gu Construction / Lihui Feng

City:Moganshan

Country:China

Text description provided by the architects. Zheng used to have a house in Shang'ao Village of Moganshan, which had the design style of rural houses in the 70s and 80s, but it had been left vacant for a long time. In 2018, when the homestay industry was still thriving, he thought about rebuilding the house. On one hand, it could serve as a homestay and generate some revenue. On the other hand, considering that the structure of the original house was not very stable and there was some adhesion to the space with the neighbors to the north, he wanted to solve these issues through reconstruction. We received Zheng's design commission through the recommendation of Chuanzhang and Xiaoqing. Zheng's requirements are simple: to have more rooms on a good design basis. 'Room' can be the concept as a starting point to connect the entire design.

A Room as a Building. We view the building as a collection of rooms and consider each room as a building itself. Thus, the design planning for the overall building's daylight, ventilation, and views is broken down into environmental analysis for each room. Views: We carefully examined the landscape characteristics surrounding Zheng's site, including mountains, bamboo, streams, vegetable gardens, traditional houses, and later self-built concrete houses. We mapped the rooms and their spatial positions to the drawn landscape ring diagram, thereby determining the visual orientation of each room building, and whether the windows need to be linked for mutual views.

Daylight: Multi-directional lighting is particularly important for shaping the three-dimensional sense and permeability of a space. Each room, located in different spatial positions, is affected by the surrounding environment and the sunlight interference from adjacent rooms, forcing us to adjust the shape of the rooms to obtain the possibility of multi-directional lighting. The inserted courtyard also provides opportunities for multi-directional lighting for each room.

Ventilation: Multi-directional lighting and window openings bring the possibility of natural cross-ventilation. By integrating the aforementioned factors such as views, lighting, and ventilation, the final design of each room is ultimately formed.

The Communality of Rooms as Buildings. Since rooms are considered as buildings, a cluster of buildings forms a community. We hope that this communal nature can be expressed in space. In the treatment of the second and third floors, we intentionally inserted some open public spaces between the rooms, which are either balconies or terraces. People can socialise or enjoy the scenery in these spaces. These public spaces unexpectedly give the entire building a valley-like spatial structure, with views penetrating through these spaces, reducing the sense of solidity of the building. This allows neighbours living on the north side to catch glimpses of the scenery on the south side through these gaps.

The Courtyard Adjoining the Neighbor to the North. Considering the issue of daylighting, we decided to insert a courtyard on the north side of the building in the early design phase, which would also maintain a certain distance between the house and the neighbour to the north. Zheng's original house was an extension of a traditional ancestral quadrangle, and it still retained the wooden structure of the old quadrangle, which was quite interesting. However, this meant that the house no longer had a clear structural boundary with the adjacent house. This was exactly what Zheng did not want. Our initial intention was to try to preserve the original wooden structure as much as possible. Since it could not be integrated into the new building, it was not a bad idea to let these structures become part of the courtyard. Therefore, the design of the courtyard was determined based on the original wooden structure to define its boundary and orientation, allowing these remnants to become a memory preserved in the courtyard. The project started in 2018 and only truly ended in 2024. Throughout the entire 6-year design and construction process, these decaying wooden structures were still preserved. However, due to the lack of protection for the wooden structure, Zheng had them demolished at the last moment under the pretext of structural decay, which was quite regrettable.

The Undisciplined Space. The way villagers use space is full of temporariness and randomness, which often piques my interest. For them, a living room is everywhere, such as a chair placed at the door that can become a reception room for chatting with neighbours for an afternoon. The dining room is also like this: two benches lined up and moved to a window can create a dining atmosphere. Before the concept of "modernity" arrived, was this the normal way people used space daily? Space was not designed with a specific function in mind; it allowed anything to happen. I am reminded of the small space forms created by scholars, furniture and nature in the paintings of Zhou Wenju, all of these small spaces strung together, slowly unfolding in the non-directional large space of silk.

On the ground public area we tried to create such a non-directional space. We embedded a 45-degree rotated cube with the central timber column as the center, giving the space a certain secretive homogeneity. The multi-entry setting of the space further blurs the specificity of the ground floor space. The placement of living room and dining room furniture becomes less obvious, as if any part could become a dining room or living room, or other functions that might be stimulated. Our floor plan does not provide any formal furniture arrangement possibilities but we hope that Zheng can provide his answer. In the design of each room on the upper floor, we also hope that the future space can serve purposes other than just being a bedroom. The pentagonal shape of the rooms and the multi-directional lighting eliminates the directional nature of the space. This greatly liberates the conventional placement of beds and furniture in the room, bringing a unique living space experience.

Hypocritical Timber Columns and Mountain Stones in Steel Structure. The use of steel structure is partly to improve the precision of rural construction, and on the other hand, to solve the problem of column-free caused by corner windows. In Zheng's residence, the steel structure is not exposed explicitly but is deliberately hidden. In the public space on the first floor, we replaced one of the steel columns with a timber column, which is exposed in the centre. This is one of the only two structural components exposed indoors, the other being the mountain stone supporting the staircase.

The introduction of timber columns points to the wooden structural remnants that once existed in the original house. In terms of the connection between the timber columns and the main steel structure, we have adopted a rather reckless approach by directly placing the lower end of the timber columns on the concrete floor, and the upper end is concealed by the ceiling in its connection with the steel beams. The clumsy connection method of the timber columns is like a joke, deliberately concealing its structural details and leaving an illusion of a decorative element. Another exposed structure placed alongside the timber column is the mountain stone. We borrowed the tradition of stone placement in Chinese gardens and used it as a structural component supporting the staircase. The stone placement thus has a specific architectural meaning. The introduction of mountain stones makes the original structure more figurative, yet ambiguous, revealing an illusion similar to that of the decorative components of the timber column.

The timber column and mountain stone, as two firgurative structural anchors, are juxtaposed with the abstract, non-directional space of the first floor, creating a texture reminiscent of Chinese gardens in the space. In the early days of 2024, with the project successfully concluded, several homestay brand proprietors approached Lao Zheng with the intention of collaborating on the operation of their lodgings. Yet, Lao Zheng harbored fresh thoughts on the matter. With his parents advancing in age, his priority was to ensure their comfort and well-being by settling them in first. Only after this would he turn his attention to deliberating on other aspects of the business.

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