Login
Registered users
The design concept focuses on transforming the traditional inward-looking Bai residential houses into a blend of inward and outward spatial experience, inspired by the site's ambiance, particularly the view of Cangshang Mountain. By reorganizing the dwellings, demolishing and adding structures, the compound now opens up to landscape while preserving traditional spatial memories. This renovation creates a new generation of miniature landscape gargens, bridging internal and external landscapes, forstering a contemporary rural lifestyle deeply rooted in nature. It's a modern interpretation and revival of the Bai people's courtyard-centered lifestyle, seamlessly integrating tradition with contemporary living.
The project blends traditional Bai village elements with expansive natural landscape. The east and north feature traditional stone and wood dwellings, while the west and south offer vast fields and distant mountains. Blancing these scales, the design extends courtyard-centered living towards the village and introduces contemporary steel roofs. To connect with nature, stone houses incorporate vertical and horizontal openings linking indoor activities with mountains. The Ruin Cafe's slope roofs bridge scales, rising towards mountains and lowering towards the courtyard. The North Building progresses from intimate garden caves to expansive attic spaces, gradually opening from courtyard to mountain vistas, enriching the spatial experience.
The project emphasizes sustainability by repurposing on-site materials like Cangshan sisal and stones from ruins, reducing costs and preserving local character. Ruins Cave Garden showcasese this approach, blending heritage with sustainability. Pre-renovation, dark interiors lacked ventilation. Steel windows and doors were introduced to enhace light and airflow, while large glass elements maximize sunlight, reducing heating needs. Ventilation fans improve circulation, and the steel systen boosts airtightness. Combined with Dali's favorable climate, theses strategies render Ruins Cave Garden energy-efficient, eliminating the need for summer air conditioning or winter heating.
While retaining the roughness and simplicity of stone and wood structure of the Bai dwellings in the construction system, the project introduces the steel structure system, which is easier to build and has better weather resistance, and carrise out renovastion and reinforcement and additions in a "half-industrial, half-handmade" construction method. The collision of the "new" light and transparent steel structure system with the "old" rough and heavy stone wall stimulates the body's tactile perception, and unifies and reshapes the memory of the place in different iterations of time. The design of the structure emphasizes the interaction with the body's perception, for example, the concrete structue in the lower part of the Ruin Cafe is combined with the furiture, and the thickness is controlled at 80mm. so that the scale boundaries between the structure and furniture become blurred, and the structure, as a part of the furniture, interacts with the body in a variety of ways. The steel roof on the top is made of counter ribs and short columns, and the short columns become part of the window frames, where the structure fades away, and what people can perceive from the interior is only a huge slightly reflective dark-colored steel plate.
The renovation enhances lighting and ventilation in the stone house by adding windows in the facade and roof, improbing comfort. The north building transforms into a spacious, naturally lit office space from a one-room dwelling. Ruins Cafe offers a unique spatial experience connecting with nature, blending views of expansive fields with intimate garden settings.
We are committed to starting from the specific relationship between architecture and region, breaking the traditional professional boundaries of architecture, interior and landscape, and conducting integrated design based on people's overall experience in the place. We understand architecture as a new connection point in the "network relationship" of the world. Through an in-depth understanding of the culture, geographical, economic and social background behind each project, we creatively design based on the project's advantageous resources and constraints, and create new "connections" through architecture. We bring naturalistic lifestyle back into people's daily lives. We use materials that combine industrialization and tradition to bring traditional poetry back into contemporary life in an economic way. We continue to explore how architecture can be used as a medium in contemporary society to reconnect people with nature, tradition and local community.
