Time passing, life changing, more and more possibilities coming up, all these have directly and drastically left marks on Beijing Hutong, which seems to be history, but for me, it’s more like future. From June 1st 2019, number 36 Guozijian Street, a small Hutong house will be put into use after more than two years of design and construction. There will be a small exhibition about our design practice. Actually it’s more of a review of our past, and we hope we can find something fun out of it, like finding new knowledge in an old book.

This house also tries to re-organize and reserve the old memories, and hope to touch people with it.We retained the building-yard relationship and the original building scale. We even inherited the illegal addition from decades ago as a miniature of people’s life in that time period and a part of history. However, we constructed a structure formed by a lower concrete frame and an upper wood frame to ironically demonstrate the grafting of old and new.

The black bricks from the century-old house as well as the red bricks from the recent addition are all reserved, and the root of a hundreds-year-old tree is right at where it was. All the old memories and craftsmanship is conserved through them. But the construction of the building applied a completely different technology. The 400mm thick hollow wall containing thermal and moisture insulation, air-conditioning system and water supply and drainage system makes a good example.