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Interior Designers: Atelier Heimat
- Area: 210 m²
- Year: 2019
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Lead Architects: Dongguang Zhang, Wenjuan Liu
Text description provided by the architects. The project is located in the cultural and creative park in the urban fringe outside the east Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, which used to be a chemical plant. Most of the buildings in the park are simple geometry in shape with large spacing. The thick walls surrounding the building are kept; only two short-direction reinforced concrete girders are left, whereas the roof is seriously damaged.
The existing building encloses a small square with two white industrial siloes in the south side. It’s a single storey building, covering an area of 160 square meters, with a cornice height of 5.8 meters. The high spatial scale and the light stray of the damaged roof are the major factors that attract us to rent it as our studio. We hope that through the design, the internal of the building will have a variety of spatial connections with the communities and the nature.
The architects adjust the space and human's behavior and perception with the smallest operation of design and the least increases of element. The sawtooth roof extends to the sky and the skylight invites the sunlight into the room with the light and shadow switching; the openings of the four external walls are different, which responds to the different surrounding environment, the design intends to create rich spatial levels to implement the possibility for people to stay and communicate by the openings, the garden and the gray space under the awning, which can transform the original productive house into a community building.
Budget and simple construction are important considerations at the beginning of our design; materials and related construction methods, personnel organization, equipment and tools, process skills, etc., become the origin for us to tap the design potential.
The materials are generally low-cost industrial building materials, such as square steel, corrugated insulation panel, polystyrene particle sandwich wall panel, cement fiberboard, etc., which are the common choice of materials in the urban fringe. The newly added elements of the building are all the tectonic systems of light steel frame plus enclosure plate. The simple construction design enables the small team to complete the construction work with simple equipment and tools and even manual operation.
In such an industrial plant area, it did not leave us too much pressure in terms of history and cultural considerations in the design, which makes us focus more on the shaping of place and space. The control of the cost and the preferential choice of the "easy to get" materials make us very cautious about the design and explore the multi-level significance of each action.
