ORDOS 100 #26: FRENTE
This villa is located in plot #35 of the ORDOS project.
Architects: FRENTE / Juan Pablo Maza
Location: Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
Design year: 2008
Construction year: 2009
Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China
Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China
Constructed Area: 1,000 sqm aprox
The immediate context drove the decision of designing an introvert villa. As a result of the extreme weather, it has been chosen to bury the house taking advantage of the generosity of underground temperatures and therefore neutralizing the harsh winter and summer weather conditions.
On the other hand, realizing the good weather during spring and autumn times, the villa responds to this duality by leaving a part of the construction completely exposed, and therefore completely extrovert. This way, the villa celebrates the duality of an introvert-extrovert house.
By taking advantage of the apparent duplicity of the required areas, eighty percent of the program has been maintained in a “big villa” (buried), which lives around an internal courtyard, in a scheme that promotes family interaction and emphasizes the sence of community. The duplicate program is separated and put into a mass equals to the size of the courtyard, thus creating a private “small villa” (floating) which gains the views and gives any family member the opportunity of temporal isolation.
By dividing the program (underground and floating), the ground floor is freed allowing it to be used as public space without loosing privacy.
The main landscape idea, is to suggest a forest within a desert environment. This forest is made out of steel columns that act as “camouflage” for the floating villa’s structure, and also gives the visitors a consciousness of trespassing private area.
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- lower level plan
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- ground level plan
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- upper level plan
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- section 01
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- section 02
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- section 03
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- section 04
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- section 05
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- section 06
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- concept diagrams
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- solar diagram
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43 comments »
forest out of steel columns? No, thanks.
it’s the first time i have seen a project that is absolutely ‘poetic’ in that ‘ordos100 project’.
Thank you FRENTE for your fabulus work!
Genius, poetic, beautiful and imaginative
I love this website
2ой нормальный проект Ордос, и первый который нравиться!
Absolutely agreed with telve. It floats.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills here. This “thing” is shamelessly ridiculous. If you want poetry, read Unamuno or Borges. Someone could commit suicide living in such a state of absurdity day and night.
more ORDROSS.
like birdcage
stunningly cerebral.
Very nice.
Bernie, I agree completely, this house is ridiculous. It seems the west has succeeded in exporting the worst of it’s architectural ideas to the east. Bravo. Why have ONE ridiculously large house when you can have TWO… so neatly connected by a curvy stair. There is nothing “cerebral” about this house unless you’re really into resource inefficiency. Horrible.
look nice whithout the others houses around, i don`t like it
floating box, never seen anything like this before, great job
its not poetic………. i think its naive ….. architecture needs to be far more sophisticated than this…….. its too literal
in 10 years, people will wander around this architectural zoo and wonder what the hell happened in 2009.
it’s an exhibition of some of the worst non site specific, banal architecture i have ever seen.
can you imagine living here?
it is abysmal
You said: “steel columns that act as “camouflage” for the floating villa’s structure”
I say: What villa? I couldn’t even see it through those dense columns. Someone pass me a machete, and I’ll see if I can clear a path….
The remarkable thing is that clients still buy into this BS. That in itself is quite a charming anachronism, I suppose?
pure imagination…love it!
well,it really looks nice when there’s on other buildings aronud it.
i’d like to see the site plan first.
architecture will not be itself when it took out of the surroundings.
the project is really nice, but this columns are absolutely unnecessary .
Some seem to forget that beauty is also part of architecture. I enjoy this project, as said before, very poetic. And if you’re saying the columns are not necessary, please stop doing architecture.
I also believe that context is not necessary an issue in this case. Although I’m against the Ordos project in general, which is a complete disgrace for the architect profession.
Beauty is completely subjective. My conception of a beautiful house is one that responds to the needs of it’s inhabitants and functions efficiently. Therefore, I find this project “ugly,” especially the non-structural columns. People should not give up the profession if they don’t agree with your sense of beauty, boppie.
I also believe that context is always an issue, unless you live in a vacuum.
Boppie, I’m glad we don’t agree in Architectural terms and I can see that I’m not the only one. Can anybody imagine living in a house full of steel columns instead a garden or a pool or just nothing around? I can’t.
Haha. Reviewing my own comment, I need to say I probably don’t agree with it myself and should have been less aggressive.
The columns are essential to the project, in my believe. Without these extra columns the concept would have been way less strong. By adding the extra columns the architect suggests there are no columns at all.
The problem with this Ordos project as a whole is the lack of context. I agree that context should always be an issue, but within this collection of icons the context could be a less important factor.
I find the Ordos project a disturbingly arrogant project, made for publicity. In my believe the project had more potential in several ways. But maybe I’m to much an idealist.
perfect visual effect. The eye didn’t understand the construction and create the effect of levitation. Maybe it’s not the best idea for living house (threw the house windows it’s better to see trees, not columns :) ) but for public building perfect idea
lol at some comments…..hehehe
Mixed feelings about this one, as it is right now I agree is somehow ridiculous.
I think that the forest-columns-camouflage idea is lost with that amount of columns, now, if they add three times more columns, it will begin to take shape.
See Patxi Mangad’s Pabellon de España for the Zaragoza expo:
http://www.arqchile.cl/pabellon_espana.htm
I think everyone is right. It is beautiful and absurd, new and redundant, a solution and a problem.
And we are all discussing it, and that justifies it for me.
No, I could definitely not live there, but I would love to visit, and I am glad to have seen it.
It can only be worthless if we don’t learn from it.
Haha, both and!
I agree, the columns are poetic. The house wants to be one of those jewels in a forest… the glass box forest tree house archi-type, except it’s not I a forest.
I also agree that I struggle to accept the columns as they perform NO function, they are purely poetic, and truly great architectural expressions are is both poetic and pragmatic, it’s finding that balance that makes architecture so complex.
Solution: put one of those elegant 3 blade wind props on top of each column, so they generate power for the site ;-)
aside from the way that the extra columns are used as a prop to disguise, its a great project. although the architect argues that it achieves a blurring of the support columns, which to his credit it does, i think it currently is a distraction without function, but Ozzie’s got a great suggestion.
the design plays a fantastic rhetorical gesture (intended or not by the architect) on the traditional Chinese courtyard house. it could use a little vegetation though as it’s a bit stark.
why can’t it be more… socialistic… this masterpiece here is far far beyond introvert state… alienating itself beyond the environtment around….
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