Luoqi Xitang Village B&B Hotel / Monolith Architects

Curated by 韩爽 - HAN Shuang

Architects: Monolith Architects
Area: 1069 m²
Year: 2018
Photographs:Lei Mao, Gang Wang
Manufacturers: Kohler, Tusjzc, Xinbu Floor

Text description provided by the architects. Recently, in China, there are more and more innovation projects rather than new buildings, and the theme of these projects are changing from city to rural area. But the rural area are no longer just traditional villages, essentially, they are more like villages from the city dwellers’ viewpoint and to satisfy city dwellers’ imagination.

Under this circumstance, village B&B hotel turns out to be a very convenient architecture type for city life to intervene in village development. What it can achieve is city dwellers’ imagination of village life. In this project, the core issue for us is how to renovate the building into a classical Chinese garden for city dwellers to escape from their city life, and create a “un-city” experience from city dwellers’ view.

This project sits at Guojiagou village, Tianjin. The site is at the center of the village, both the north side and south side of the site have a small pool, on the west side is a hill, and east side is the main village area. Between the main village area and the site, there is a big square and the main road, all the village roads are distributed in fan shape and centered to the site.

The existing buildings are a group of single floor buildings with grey tiles sloping roof and black bricks supported structure. We maximized the existing circumstance, maintained and emphasized the main structure of existing building, based on this strategy, we introduced in steel structures, white cubes, glazed walls, wooden grilling, and other modern materials to achieve a balance between new and old.

We use outdoor corridors as semi interior space tool to connect all isolated existing buildings and change them into a single building with strong inner relationship. Then, we use new walls and new volumes to change public spaces between buildings and along pools into private spaces as inner courtyards, dooryards or rooms.

The process of entering every single room is from public space to semi public space then to private space, as a series of experience like wandering in classical Chinese gardens. The originally private center courtyard was changed into a center public space surrounded by tearoom, lobby, main entrance, and restaurant, this new center courtyard connected the square and hill belongs to the villagers and can be shared by the guest and villagers together as a public center.