Words Judith Torres
Images Shengliang Su, Ben Soon, Siyu Chen, and Fengyu Zhu
“It’s an elegant and beautiful project.”
“It’s so nice to see an ordinary building kept and reused—reimagined, really.”
“Great project!”
“Thank you. We believe not only heritage buildings deserve to be well treated. Ordinary older buildings have their own quality to be explored and reused.”
“And you’ve done it elegantly.”
So went the exchange between three jurors with Atelier Tao+C principal Chunyan Cai at the close of her crit that won her the New & Old Category of the World Architecture Festival’s World Building of the Year competition last year.
The project also won the World Interior Festival’s top prize, Interior of the Year, and a slew of accolades, along with the firm’s inclusion in China’s 100 Most Influential Architects and Interior Designers 2021. Word spread fast about the young firm with a fresh voice and perspective, and a sensitive approach to renewing the built environment. And so it was with much anticipation that attendees hung on to every word of Chunyan’s presentation at Buensalido Architects’ B+Abble 2022 architecture and design festival.
Chunyan, who calls herself CC, had just expounded on three early projects (see Architecture as Furniture) that helped her and partner Tao Liu develop their thinking on furniture vis à vis architectural fragments. The experience, she says, prepared them to be inventive in solving the space limitations of the Capsule Hostel in the Rural Library project they undertook in 2019.
As CC explained to the B+Abble audience, “From the U-shape Room experience, we were thinking more and more about how to design architecture [as furniture because] furniture is more relevant to your movement, to your activities, and the dimension is always just what is needed.”
The Problem
The client leased the lands of Qinglongwu, an ancient village in the forested mountains of Tonglu in Zhejiang province, where he planned to put up luxury villas. A farmhouse built in the 1930s of rammed earth and timber was situated in the center of the village, which the client thought would be a good place to welcome visitors to Qinglongwu. He also thought of converting it to a capsule hostel, to provide inexpensive accommodations for students and backpackers. Atelier Tao+C suggested that the old farmhouse also house a library for visitors and nearby villagers to enjoy.
And so, the challenge was not only how to make all the functions fit in the 90-year-old, 5.1-meter high, 201-square-meter structure, but to make the compact space feel open and welcoming to the community, while ensuring the privacy of their lodgers.
The old house needed to be reinforced. The rammed earth walls were listing and needed support. The construction team, comprised of workers from a nearby village, dug down to lower the floor by 0.8 meters and erect a steel structure that would hold up the new floors and partitions they would build, plus a new roof raised by 1.6 meters.
Lifting the roof and lowering the ground floor gave Atelier Tao+C an additional 2.4 meters, raising the total interior height to 7.5 meters—still not a great elevation for what the architects needed.
“For a capsule hostel and library together, we would need at least three floors, one for the library and one for the guys’ capsule rooms, then another level of capsule rooms for the girls. But three floors would yield 2.2 meters for every floor, which is very low, very tight, and very boring,” recounts CC.
Challenging standards
“So, we started thinking, this is not the solution. And then, we thought, why do we have to make the height the [standard] architectural height? Why don’t we make the height how people who stay will need it?
“Before we did any plan or section, we thought about what we need for a capsule unit. A capsule is a chamber only for people to sleep inside. So, we decided to compress the dimensions of a room to [that of] furniture. The room would be exactly the size of the mattress. And then we have a bookshelf wrapped around it outside. And then we start to stack the capsules over each other.”
The team settled on 1.35 meters as the height guests needed to get into their capsules and sit up while inside. Simply stacking two capsules would yield a ceiling height of almost 3 meters for corridors but staggering the floor slabs would create unconventional spaces and very interesting sightlines.
Like the U-Shaped Room, where split levels enabled the designers to fit multiple functions in a small space and give its users a sense of privacy while allowing them to easily talk to one another, the staggered floor plates of the hostel provide privacy for the lodging areas while allowing connection and communication between floors. The split levels have also created a quirky three-floor space with unique and unexpected perspectives.
“So, now, we have a section that is very interesting. The floors are overlapping, and the space becomes very playful and exploratory. The privacy is guaranteed, but there’s a lot of eye contact and a lot of different perspectives that make you feel like you’re in a big space.”
“In the end, we achieved a building with 4.5 levels. One for the public, the library, two floors for capsule rooms—20 capsules, ten for male, ten for female. On the fourth floor are the bathrooms. And then we have endless bookshelves.”
Furthermore, the unusual scale and configuration enabled Atelier Tao+C to create a triple-height space for the reception area on the ground floor—a very open and welcoming space, indeed, to receive village visitors. Opening up the space even further was the installation of the glazed east end of the building.
“We opened the gable wall out because there is a great view over here and now this becomes a gathering place for people to sit here to look at the views,” says CC.
“When we extended this building, we didn’t try to extend with a fake rammed earth wall, we just exposed what is already there and what is new. At the end of the wall, we have an exciting coming together of rammed earth, bamboo fiberboard for the bookshelves (because there’s a lot of bamboo in this area), recycled stone bricks on the floor, and the polycarbonate panels.”
Buildings inside the building
Instead of having one floor for the men’s capsules and another floor for the women’s, the team built separate ‘buildings’ for each, inside the gutted farmhouse.
When it comes to adaptive reuse and renovation, nesting buildings inside an older building is something of an Atelier Tao+C m.o. They want to avoid “interrupting” the original shell and erect, instead, freestanding structures inside so that when owners or needs change, the inside structures can be removed or renovated without harming the old shell housing them.
Nested buildings also produce fascinating ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ spaces within the shell, enabling Atelier Tao+C to create multiple unique user experiences. Adds CC: “And views you have never seen before.”
Breaking rules, splitting spaces, and reducing scale are other another Atelier Tao+C m.o. Here, the private capsule areas were compressed to give the village reception area a dramatic height open to the sky and forest, and the public reading room, expansive breathing space.
Sleek metal staircases connect the split-level floors. The short height difference from platform to platform requires only nine steps. The short stairways create meandering paths up and down the building. Transition and resting spaces invite people to take it slow, perhaps sit and converse, or quietly appreciate the collection of books at each level.
Both male and female ‘buildings’ hold aloft ten capsules, three toilets, three baths, and a changing room. Each capsule enjoys a voyeuristic view of the hostel and library interiors through windows, which are square openings punched through the bookshelves. So, if you see a bookshelf compartment without any books, it just might be a closed capsule window.
The capsules also have windows that open to the outdoors, a concession Atelier Tao+C made to allow light and fresh air into the rooms. The firm also punched a few more openings in the rammed earth walls, with windows sills wide enough to sit on—perfect alcoves for reading. Holes were also punched through the roof to let daylight streak into the interior spaces.
“At night, the light from inside lights up the village and attracts a lot of people to come here. This library for sure revived this small village,” CC says at the close of her presentation. The World Interior Festival super jury was no less impressed than the young crowd at B+Abble, although their questions were sharper.
“Thank you for this project that is full of architectural invention and must be fun to explore!” exclaimed one juror.
“It’s a bit like a contemporary monastery, isn’t it, with the cells and the library?” remarked another wistfully.
“What is the significance of the building and what historic preservation rules did you have to work alongside?” asked another one.
“What building techniques did you learn from the local builders that worked on the project?” the head juror wanted to know.
“How did you as architects help the owner recoup his expenses? Can 20 capsules pay for the renovation and upkeep of the building?”
Having watched CC’s presentations at WAF, INSIDE, and B+Abble, and considering her thesis at The Berlage and how the practice has evolved from 2016 to the present, it is eminently clear that Atelier Tao+C—or at least CC—is true to their professed values and concerns.
Having also watched other architects and designers analyze the Atelier’s presentations (see Inside Look: Day 3), I am not alone in believing that the young firm is a force for good in a high-tech society of immediacy and culture of ever-increasing materialism and speedy gratification.
Good design can save the world and CC appears to have a savior’s heart. There is not a building so banal that she cannot ennoble. There is not a material so mundane their designs can’t elevate. And there’s apparently no space so insipid that Atelier Tao+C can’t infuse with spirit.
So far, the Atelier has not restored buildings of historical significance. They are uniquely gifted with sight that sees beauty in the humdrum and possibilities for meaningful human experiences where there seems to be no space for them.
So, they’re one of China’s 100 most influential architects and interior designers? May their influence spread to the rest of the world.