Guo Zijian Hutong House

Text description provided by architect.

Time passing, life changing, more and more possibilities coming up, all these have directly and drastically left marks on Beijing Hutong, which seems to be history, but for me, it’s more like future.

Actually it’s more of a review of our past, and we hope we can find something fun out of it, like finding new knowledge in an old book. This house also tries to re-organize and reserve the old memories, and hope to touch people with it.

However, we constructed a structure formed by a lower concrete frame and an upper wood frame to ironically demonstrate the grafting of old and new. The black bricks from the century-old house as well as the red bricks from the recent addition are all reserved, and the root of a hundreds-year-old tree is right at where it was.

The 400mm thick hollow wall containing thermal and moisture insulation, air-conditioning system and water supply and drainage system makes a good example.

Now we may find that our physical home might be small indeed, but the home inside our heart is big. Toilets causing problems in Hutong, is a rather extreme example of space influencing daily life.

Neither of the two situation is what I want to see. My expectation of Hutong’s future is a neighborhood that inhabitants have more space and better living quality, and more importantly a yard and a better relationship with neighbors. This is what I think Beijing Hutong should be.

Of course I can also lift it up to have more rooms, meanwhile a spectacular scene that people always ignore in which roofs and tree tops interwoven together will be created, in which a naked Eddie Peng maybe running around.

In the end of 2016, an opportunity came to us when a friend of mine planned to build his own house in Hutong. When I showed him the idea, as a Beijinger with the same imagination, he was also very excited.

This machine-like house is more than an improvement of the existing social problems. It’s a contemplation of infinity, time and life. Everything that moves reminds us of life, and with life comes death.

The change this design truly brings to people is the process of transforming from dangerous relationship to daily etiquette. We believe that this would bring people dignity and equality. It constantly reminds family members that, although you live in your home, everyone in the family reappears as a complete individual in society.

Extrovert space might just be the beginning of mutual respect. Looking back now, although it’s a new house, it seems to have been built for 50 years. Being familiar and strange at the same time, perhaps it’s a memory from future.