The Home for Martial Arts in Foshan: chinese tradition combined with new structures

We created Ke Yuan (Ke Garden), home for the descendants of the He Family, with “Ke” indicating something worth having.
Remote village houses are faintly visible in a distance, while curvy smoke rise quietly and gently into the sky.
Old streets and winding alleys, towering banyan trees, black tiles and white walls, and grey tile pavement.
The past and the present are woven into the crisscross of time. For thousands of years, the world has been changing, yet people here still live a relaxed and unhurried life, soothing the restless hearts in the bustling life.
The Chinese character 「园」 was written as 「園」in ancient times, with a small 「口」 inside, meaning a pool. No garden can be truly called a garden without water, which injects life into the garden and makes it a true 「家園(home)」.We introduced the concept of Chinese garden and designed a four-story building for this house. The sunken parlor on the first floor encloses a comfortable and cozy space. Outside the parlor are western and Chinese kitchens and the restroom.On the second floor is a suite for the elderly and an open-style study. Rooms for the brother and the sister are symmetrically provided on the third floor, with restrooms of mortise-and-tenon geometry placed in between. The entire fourth floor is for the master bedroom suite, including study and pantry. The rooftop provides a void space for leisure and gathering.
The staircases, as key elements of the building, wind vertically and horizontally through void and solidness. With elaborated designed spatial density and varied heights of spaces, the major spaces are highlighted and differentiated from the minor ones, creating lively interior spaces of varied levels.
The past and the present of the building are synchronized. On top of the old one which bears the marks of the past, a new shell is added as a box to accommodate the growth, fostering a strong sense of transition in time and space.
We combined the traditional triangular mechanics with the new concrete structure to retain the slope roof of the old house, with the first and second floors bearing the imprints of the old house and the third and fourth floors adding new buildings. The suspended structure makes the building look a bit lighter. Large-area lighting doors and windows were opened in the south side and long narrow windows in the north side as auxiliary lighting points. In the third and fourth floors, the terrace-backwards lighting design was adopted. Through the inner-back skylights on second and third floors, the light can reach the bottom of the house, thus making "Sishui Guitang" (The unique layout of traditional Chinese houses which demonstrates the great intelligence of “Nature and Man in One”. ) a reality, which was valued by ancient Chinese people. The properties of objects are highlighted to bring out the pure beauty and acquire symbols of distinctive Lingnan memory. This means returning to the intuitive and keen sensibility of objects, just like the poetic touch of light, the melodies of the babbling raindrops, the imagination about life at the smell of tea, and the warm feeling at the sight of dim morning light.
The mortise-tenon connection which enjoys a history of over 7000 years plays a key part in ancient buildings. Yet with the advances in technology, it has now faded in architecture, and serves more as a cultural symbol. We refined the traditional mortise-tenon connection to form the skeleton of the whole building, Along the building skeleton comprising the mortise and tenon, lighting system is concealed and installed, enabling new functions of mortise and tenon and conveying the inherent oriental complex in spaces.
Like all artificial objects, building will weather and disappear one day.Building created by people will last forever, not in its physical form but as a fond memory in people’s hearts.

【Material】
System: air conditioning system and fish pond filtration system hidden in the ceilings
Paint:gray art paint、outdoor real stone paint
Stone:cave stone、rock slab、volcanic rock
Glass:super white tempered glass、silver mirror
Wood:wood floor、wood veneer、merbau、fire-proof plate
Metal:dark gray stainless steel

【Process and technology】
Building structure
The house is of a frame structure, the load is chiefly focused on the four pillars on both sides of the house. Traditional trigonometric mechanics combined with new concrete structure is used to keep the sloping roof of the old house, with both sides overhanging, so as to gain the maximum daylighting area. As the foundation load is comparatively large, the pile cap foundation is used with a piling depth of 20 meters and an inserted reinforced frame of 8 meters, which resolves the geological soft problem.

Mortise and tenon structure
Apart from taking mortise and tenon as a structure, it is designed to embed the concealed works of ceilings.
The lighting circuits and lamps are hidden in mortise and tenon in combination; the custom U-shaped groove is used to open a round hole to hide in the spotlight; the mortise and tenon cylindrical merbau reserves grooves beforehand to hide the light strip.
The entire mortise and tenon system run indoors and outdoors, combining traditional aesthetics with modern life functions on the strength of contemporary technology.

Stair structure
After precise calculation of the load, install steel structure and stairs with reference to the structural drawings
On-site base leveling
On-site rescaling and cardboard lofting
The factory cuts and processes the products based on the dimension drawings, 12 edges of footboards are cut and spliced into boxes of finished products at 45 degrees, and then the boxes are numbered and packaged.
Glue and fix with the base layer to protect the finished products on site.