Thousand Island Lake Square House / Ray&Emilio Studio
Thousand Island Lake Square House / Ray&Emilio Studio
Text description provided by the architects. Fang House is located in Zhangshuxia Village, Qiandao Lake, Hangzhou city. The homestead of Fang House is a rectangular plot of 8mX12m, which is also the largest area that the village grants uncle Fang to build. The house site is located in the inner part of the village. The house is surrounded by three-story residential houses, and there is hardly any view of the lake from the inside of the house. Blocked by the surrounding volume of the building, the architects decided to design the site as an “inner space construction”, with two vertical atriums in this small box. When viewed from the outside, it is a very simple square box, all openings are inward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXMLEiG_xFo
The owner, Uncle Fang, used to live and work in Hangzhou. After retirement, he decided to go back to his hometown Qingdao Lake and rebuild the old house. At the same time, it was convenient for him to take care of the elderly. So Uncle Fang made an important appeal: he hoped to get a multi-generation house. The first floor would be reserved for two rooms for the elderly, the second floor for Uncle Fang’s own room and tea room, and the third floor for the future owners of the house: Uncle Fang’s son and his family. He thought it would be better to have about 10 rooms in the house so that his son could stay with the baby on weekends. “A home is a happy place,” Uncle Fang always said.
The residential site 8mX12m is an archetypal scale. How to divide the 10 rooms into such a space is a problem that the architect needs to think carefully about. We first set up the smallest room unit scale in village dwellings: 3mx4m. The longitudinal 12m can be divided into 4M + 4M + 4M, and the middle is used as a breathable transit living room. The lateral 8m is divided into 1M5 +3.25m+3.25m, where the two misaligned Spaces of 1M5x8m are used as a tiny, breathable atrium space. The two long and narrow atria form the most characteristic part of this plan. The two sides separate the atria to establish the connection between space and space. The atria are the link of connection, the circulation of breath, and the place of communication between people.
The two atrium Spaces allow the room to move beyond its physical dimensions, and in this case, the atrium is an extension of the room’s internal space. From the rectangular interior of the room, the room can be extended in another direction through the French viewfinder window. People can perceive a long and narrow space with a length of nearly 8m and a width of only 1m5 in the interior of the room. We hope that the whole house itself is a livable, impressive, and tourable introverted box, which can be well used and lived in and can also be well visited and appreciated.
Two narrow atria are the collection of all the traffic space, all the stairs are set to run the stairs alone, people are all rising path around the two vertical atria has risen in a spiral, it also makes all paths are surrounded by the outer boundary of the building, which is to maximize the possibility of increased travel.
“The old house has a straight stairwell, not a folding staircase. I don’t like the stairs that turn. I like the stairs you designed, which are the same as the old house.” Uncle Fang said. The staircase is located at the side of the old house, although the new design is no longer the traditional wood construction, but the scale of the staircase and the same type of form. These can be a real wake of the memory of the old house, the fragments of childhood grow up stories.
As a box of inner space, the atrium is also a box of light and time. In this building, the two atria correspond to two different orientations of east and west, so when we sit inside the room and look into the atrium, we will find that the atrium has “time”. We can see the movement and change of the sun’s shadow, see the direct light in the morning and afternoon respectively in the two atria, see the light at noon almost vertical wash on the wall, and so on. When we casually raise our heads, we can see the clouds moving in the sky, or the rain making a splash on the glass skylight. Here the hours of the day can be slowed down, and the flow of “time” is just another comfort of country life.
