ORDOS 100 #36: Preston Scott Cohen
This villa is located in plot #47 of the ORDOS project.
Architects: Preston Scott Cohen
Location: Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
Project Team: Preston Scott Cohen (Design); Hao RUAN, David Shanks(Project Assistants); Yair Keshet(Model)
Design year: 2008
Construction year: 2009-2010
Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China
Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China
Constructed Area: 1,000 sqm aprox
For architecture, the large contemporary house poses a problem of proportionality and character. Big houses tend to become little buildings imbued with an institutional character. Too often, they are comparable to small museums with interiors more suitable for exhibition than for dwelling.
This house at once concedes to and intensifies this tendency while proposing an alternative. While it appears to be an unusually miniature, monumental building, it nevertheless provides interior spaces that are unexpectedly domestic in character. The surrounding neighborhood of houses does not allow a contextual sense of belonging. Thus, the miniature building acts like a buoy – anchored and adrift – without the usual moorings of a house. In lieu of a significant architectural context, surrounded by an arid landscape and subject to severe weather conditions, the house needs to establish its own setting in order to provide an oasis within it.
Initially, the house appears to be a small, townhouse-like urban dwelling with an overgrown roof garden. In fact, this is the least of it. Below it is a large, rambling entertainment and guest villa, organized around two courtyards. Between the two is a tumultuous landscape-like form that unmoors the townhouse and ostensibly causes it to lean.
Inside the tower, the inhabitant will feel the tilt. The building envelope will seem to be independent of the interior, with the stairs binding all levels from top to bottom in a coil-like fashion, leading from the lowest public living room to the garage (the garage is located between the upper and lower houses), and winding its way around the leaning tower all the way up to the private roof terrace on top.
In the villa below, the primary interior living spaces alternate with the exterior courtyards, thus overcoming the underground condition. A railing/fence surrounds the whole house, protecting it from uninvited scrutiny. Where people are able to look down, from the driveway and entry, they will see the pool, not the living room or private bedrooms. Being skewed, the courtyards create a sense of expansiveness and drift as opposed to confinement or containment.
The house is a rough, poured-in-place concrete frame and infill structure clad in gray brick and tile. The tower cantilevers from a reinforced concrete base frame that is supported by two large reinforced concrete structural arches and from tension rods cast in the diagonally opposite linear edges of the hyperbolic parobolas.
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- plan 01
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- plan 02
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- plans 03
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- geometry diagram
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- structure diagram
am i masoquist??? i really enjoy seeing these ordos projects… :S
this project would be nice if it was a department building.. being a house the scale does not look accurate, I bet the architect realized about it when (while doing the render) he had to scale the tree on the roof down to 1 and a half mt high or so.
PLOT/BIG/JDS rip-off.
cohen has been around for a long time. this is just his style, not a BIG, JDS, etc. rip off. if anything, the fact that you can name three firms that have almost the exact same aesthetic is gross.
maybe they all have the same aesthetic b/c BIG and JDS used to be PLOT?!?!
…How many Ordos projects are there? I’d like to finally see a good one at some point. The other day I was talking to an actual Ordos architect, regarding the generally bad critical reception they’ve garnered, and he mentioned he thought it was mostly due to envy. Well, I would’ve definitely liked to have designed a house there [who knows, maybe I would’ve sucked too], but honestly, I can only think of three or four projects there that have seemed interesting; most of the ones posted so far have been rather sophomoric formal exercises or derivative sculptural experiments… I would’ve loved to have designed the Kursaal in San Sebastián, rather than Moneo, but I can still accept the fact that his result is simply extraordinary. My two cents.
nice project, one of my ordos favs!…but the railing on that stair could use some love.
I’m actually really disappointed by PSC on this project. Compared to Torus, it’s just geometrically so much less compelling. The Dutch influence and dumbing down of his complex surface manipulations are just so… mundane.
no no no no..this is perfect..
what is there the concept????? There’s no concept, it’s just again doing something. Totally aseptic renders – no warm ambiance at all! :-(
That house has an expression of a congressbuilding or a “art gallery” but deffently not like a house….there was going something wrong with the scale!
A puplic house in Ordos? It’s just an ugly made tower..
Are cowboys doing architecture? I guess they ride cows. There are 100 houses in ordos. better check the ordos website instead of doing clever!
@no-one
Plot was JDS/BIG and yes it is gross that I can name a zillion architecture firms that make the same gimmicky built bling for the same status-seeking authoritarian regimes.
It is not illegal to do so but, as you’ve mentioned, this situation pretty much sums up the “gross” panorama of the architecture that gets more praise nowadays.
http://sorcerer.design.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/f2008/ORDOS.mov
The link above is a video lecture at Harvard GSD about 9 of the Ordos Buildings including this project.
This isn’t as bad as some of the other Ordos houses. I kind of like some of the geometry. The renderings are a bit cold but they are renderings not the real building. Put some people in there and some art on the walls and furniture and curtains and everything and it will warm up.
Lucas: yeah curtains! -straight curtains on tilted windows.
That’s so brilliant I wonder if PSC even thought of that.
More houses like shops, less shops like shops…….?
I love this project. It is a good strategy in north China, hiding the main part underground. The skim tower is also an excellent approach to be implicitly special among ordos 100 houses.
f’ing horrible. i looks like a small office tower is being flushed and i’m sure the inhabitants will feel that way. i think it should be relegated to outer mongolia.
6:01 AM Dec 1st
ORDOS 100 #36: Preston Scott Cohen #architecture http://t.co/jq1bNZW @archdaily