Architecture as Furniture: Atelier Tao+C’s Approach to Architectural Renewal and Adaptive Reuse

Editor’s note: This is our exclusive recap of Atelier Tao+C co-founder Chunyan Cai’s keynote presentation for B+Abble, an annual conference on contemporary Philippine architecture and design organized by Buensalido + Architects.

Many architects see adaptive reuse projects as giving new life to an old building. “We think it’s the second life of the building, but actually, the building might have a third life and a fourth life,” says Chunyan Cai, in answer to a question about Atelier Tao+C’s ethos.

“So, I always try to do adaptive reuse that does not interrupt too much of the existing building. We always put light structures into the building and keep the spaces flexible. The design and the structure could work for 10 or 20 years for the client, and then, when a new function and a new request [arise], the design I put in can be easily taken out. That’s why all the projects I have done are light structures, like structures as furniture. They can be easily assembled and disassembled.”

CC, as Chunyan Cai calls herself, is in Shanghai, speaking via Zoom to a Filipino audience at B+Abble, an annual architecture and design festival organized by Buensalido+Architects. She has just finished presenting five Atelier Tao+C projects, and the crowd showed their appreciation with a long round of applause and unbridled praise from those who stepped to the mic to ask her questions.   

The Filipino audience is not alone in calling Atelier Tao+C’s design solutions “brilliant” and “genius.” The Shanghai-based firm, founded by Tao Liu and CC just seven years ago in 2016, has won numerous awards, the most recent being INSIDE 2021’s Interior of the Year, where the super jury praised the atelier’s conversion of an abandoned farmhouse into a library and capsule hostel as “sensitive and inventive” and a “beautiful hybrid idea executed with poetry, sophistication, and warmth.”

Tao+C was a most appropriate highlight of B+Abble 2022: Rewind to Re-Wild, which focused on conservation, creative renovation, and adaptive reuse. The Netherlands-educated architect, however, is not into adaptive reuse as many of us understand it, so much as architectural renewal, which is based on a strong sense of responsibility for the environment and the avoidance of waste.

“People usually think of adaptive reuse as heritage projects, that the character of the existing building is very strong. But the preexisting structures I work on are not great. They are not fantastic; they are actually very generic buildings, all of them. They are small, very ordinary, all very low budget. That’s why we also work with very low budgets, straightforward detail, and materials that are cheap and easy to source. They are not tailor-made—you buy them from the market. Because if we say we renovate old buildings to recycle and not waste materials, then that [must also be] how you renovate.”

Manifesto

CC’s ethos of “architecture as furniture” so as not to “interrupt a preexisting structure too much” is something she developed while in school, which she first fully expressed in her thesis at the Berlage, a post-master program at TU Delft (Delft University of Technology). It’s a way of thinking she says is all the more relevant in a world upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. She explains:

“Over the last three years, we experienced our world of architecture fading out and people living more and more with the interior, the streets emptied of people, and collective spaces shut off. We are separated, but the objects, the furniture, and the equipment wire us together. The world has become an endless interior landscape. So, somehow, we think of architecture as a scaffolding for the living and the inside as the real thing that determines our life. So, we think: How can we reorganize and reconfigure our lives with elements of the interiors—the objects, furniture, and fragments of architecture?”  

She says this way of thinking has deeply influenced Atelier Tao+C’s work, which always tries “to explore an exquisite sense of scale alongside the objects within the spaces.”

Furniture, Room, Pre-Existing Structure

To illustrate how the firm’s thinking about architecture renewal developed and was put into practice over the years, CC presented their very first project, the atelier’s office with a sleeping alcove (2016); a single-use room converted to a couple’s home (2018); the atelier’s current office created from two spaces belonging to two adjacent buildings (2019); a farmhouse converted into a library and capsule hostel (2020); and a furniture showroom nestled inside an old warehouse (2022). The first three projects will be tackled here.

Atelier Tao+C office, 2016

Photographed by Su Sheng Liang, Chen Hao, Zhu Hai, and Santiago Barrio

“We started in 2016 with two persons only—me and my partner, Liu Tao. Because there were only two of us, we decided to rent a home office in a very generic 1980s compound. You see that it’s quite old and people are living here and putting stuff outside.”

CC describes the old building where they rented a ground floor space as an “anonymous residential building,” one that looks just like many other old residential buildings in Shanghai, with units that are “always very narrow, 3.5 meters in width… and very deep.”

Because Tao and Chunyan would use it for work, they wanted their office to be as open and as big as the small space would allow, which meant compressing their living quarters to be as small as possible. “How can we achieve a nice living space that is also very functional?” they asked themselves. “So, we designed what we call a sleeping alcove, or a living box on the north side. We put a wooden box made of MDF, and this is where the bed is… a bookshelf, working table, and also a bench beside the window, with window shutters I can close. And here is a detail of the lighting we designed.

Inhabitable furniture

“So, the idea is we made a bed [which is] furniture, but we went beyond the dimension of furniture. It has depth that people can walk into, and so the furniture becomes a room. It’s a blurry boundary between what is furniture and what is a room. When furniture can be walked into or lived in, it’s hard to tell what it is. It’s also weird that the window, an architectural element, is not part of the [building] façade, but a part of the furniture panel.”

From that first project, Tao and CC became even more excited to explore further blurring the boundary between furniture and rooms, achieving ‘exquisite scale,’ and compressing the size of certain living areas to achieve more space and functionality in pre-existing structures. The opportunity to do just that came when the atelier converted an old lady’s bedroom into a full-fledged apartment for a young couple.

Composite Piece of Furniture-Structure in a U-Shaped Room, 2018

Photographed by Fangfang Tian

The project is a 42-square-meter room in an old villa in Shanghai lived in by several families. “Every room there is a family, and they share the kitchen and bathroom in the corridor. There was an old lady living here who was too old to live alone and moved into her cousin’s home. So, the room was abandoned, and my work was to transform this single-function room into a space that [performs] all the functions for a young couple to live here—a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, storage room, dining room, and such and such.”

The solution: to build inside the room a large “furniture” piece to convert the single-floor, single-function room into a three-split-level space that performs all the couple’s required functions. “We put a two-level free-standing plywood structure into the center of the room, leaving the windows, ceiling, and wall intact.”

“We usually live in houses with all the functions partitioned by walls and the rooms enclosed. In this project, we didn’t [erect] any walls so that sunlight and views come in without barrier. But [the apartment] still houses a lot of different areas so that the couple can each have their own space and privacy, [yet] still very easily to talk to each other.

“So, is this furniture or architecture we built in the small room?” CC asks the audience. “Either way you can name it,” she answers herself.

“So, we are always thinking about how we [shift between] furniture and architectural fragment, like the library step in this [illustration]. It can be seen as an architectural fragment, as steps. But when it is closed, it’s a furniture piece. Our experience in these projects helped us design the Capsule Hostel in a Rural Library, which we did in 2019.”

Atelier Tao+C Office, 2019

Photographed by Wen Studio

Before discussing the firm’s much-celebrated Capsule Hostel and Rural Library project, CC presented their current office, in which furniture (a table) gave sense and flow to a highly irregular space, and architectural fragments (beams and partition frames) create a sense of inside and outside in an indoor space. 

“We are still a very small firm with 10 persons, and the projects we are working on are actually quite small, from 20 to 400 square meters. Nowadays, we’re in the process of designing our biggest projects. Half of our projects are interior, and half are architecture.”

“So, this is my office; it’s a very weird shape, like a gun, and it connects two different building programs together. On the left side is an apartment or residential building where usually every room is 3.5 meters wide. And then on the other side, it’s a commercial building used for offices and some shops, round in shape, 13 meters, with columns and bearing walls.”

“I rented it because the rental is very cheap. But then I found it very difficult to design an office that will be quite useful for us. I don’t want people to work separately in small rooms because, as a design office, we have to work together and discuss and argue to make ideas become more solid and move on. So, how do we solve the problem where the small rooms on the left side become one big space?”

CC had all the non-structural walls demolished, leaving a still very odd-shaped space interrupted by columns and load-bearing walls. It would be a challenge to fit regular office tables and chairs in a space so irregular. The solution: Build one long table that wraps around the irregularities.

“So now there’s an 11-meter-long oversize table interlocked with the structural walls and built-in conversation pits, spanning five kinds of spaces.”

“The table connects with the structure and the spaces around it. So, the table becomes the library and material library here, with some seats over here. And on this side, it becomes our dining room, our pantry (where the blue table is), and it goes across all the walls and then becomes a meeting or working table (the rounded end). So, imagine, when the furniture grows over the general size, it becomes a device that can change the space and the overall interior.”

“When we put the big table, the room was totally changed. You don’t see it as [a collection of] small rooms, but a very open and deep space opened up by the changes we made.”

The commercial building side of the office had its own set of challenges too. CC found the curving beam on the ceiling interesting and wanted to preserve it. But following through with curving walls would make a circular room, in which it would be difficult to lay out right-angled office furniture.

“So, we used light gauge steel frames to make a square space underneath…the round space overhead, which makes the space very interesting. When I come into this staircase to go into our office, we see the shape of light gauge steel and the [circular] canopy. And here we see how the round and square shapes work together.”

“Usually, light gauge steel frames are hidden by gypsum board, but we didn’t put any, so the rooms are transparent, but the space is defined.” To further define the working space, the square floor area is painted with white epoxy, while the peripheral areas remain bare concrete. “So, you feel like there’s an inside and outside in the interior.” Adding plants creates the feel of a working space surrounded by a garden.

The use of different materials for the two sides of the office creates an entirely different atmosphere from one to the other. “The commercial side is large and bright, while the back side where we have the library is kind of dark and the dimension quite intimate.”

“So, that’s how we [approach] adaptive reuse or how we [deal with] pre-existing structures. We try to not just put in our new stuff but to understand what has already been there and what the new function is requesting, and then we try to make everything new that can be added to the old but not interrupt the process of the old.”

Designing for the human being

After presenting the Capsule Hostel (Winner of WAF 2021’s Old & New category) and ZIIN Beijing showroom (shortlisted in WAF 2022’s Old & New category), CC explained why the firm does so many adaptive reuse projects: “Over the last 20 years, China has known rapid growth and so much construction, we already have enough architecture. I’m happy that we have a lot of adaptive reuse projects—low budget, very straightforward, and a very short time period. I like to work with these projects because they’re not very polished in detail and materials, yet we are able to [create] a new beauty and functionality that is timely.”

During the Q&A after Chunyan’s talk, B+Abble host Gerard Dy remarked how “brilliantly” Atelier Tao+C produced space through split levels and reconfigurations where there seemed to be no space left. He asked the guest architect: “Knowing that your practice ‘redefines and blurs the borders of the house according to our acts and daily habits’ and knowing each client has different habits and culture, what patterns and commonalities have you discovered recurring in each adaptive reuse project?”

Her response profoundly reflects the thinking of a designer fully conscious of their responsibility to society and the environment—one who refuses to tear down the old to build something new and will instead adapt what already exists so that it may be reused. 

“I think a project that works well is not tailor-made for only one person, but for human beings because humans always [share] common ground. So [while] we answer to everything needed by the client, we always think about how his request connects to the common ground.

By creating architecture as furniture in old shells, Atelier Tao+ prolongs the life of the shell. By designing for human beings instead of ego, the firm creates highly adaptable environments. In so doing, Atelier Tao+C actively combats obsolescence and waste—two of the terrible banes of the modern economy. •

B+Abble is an annual creative conference organized by Buensalido+Architects. At B+Abble, “…movers and shakers from various creative fields share their wisdom and learnings from their respective journeys and experiences, challenging and inspiring the creative community to think differently and create positive disruptions in their own practices.” For inquiries, email Buensalido+Architects at design@buensalidoarchitects.com, or send a message to Buensalido+Architects on Facebook or Instagram.

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