Readers’ House

This is the scene of the "72-hour new media" live broadcast of the third season of CCTV's "The Reader", which was carefully planned and implemented by the CCTV team.

These three wooden houses witnessed the moment when hundreds of ordinary citizens picked up their books and read their hearts out, witnessing their pain and comfort, joy and memories, courage and hope; meanwhile, they also touched the hearts and minds of countless people online.

This is, after all, a small house with a simple space and little technical difficulty, but it is certain special requirements and constraints that make the communication and discussion about technical feasibility crucial and intensively accompany the project throughout:

1. Assembled wood construction was pretty much the only option. The strict time limit for rapid construction required that using assembled components will be the only way out.

Then, the strict prohibition of damage to the current state of the site and also the prohibition of open fires and noise during construction, as well as the extremely short allowable time for component processing, basically ruled out the possibility of assembled steel structures.

2. it is no longer possible to use insulated glass curtain wall production and processing, so the PC boards (acrylic boards) became an acceptable alternative.

We did have tried to use double-layer insulated PC boards to solve the problem of heat insulation and energy saving as well as flatness, or to set up some opening glass windows. However, none of these attempts survived through huge obstacles. At last, we could only set down with single-layer of 12mm thick PC boards as enclosure.

The bright side to this is that the program was held during the middle of October, so the temperature is mild and stable in all three sites, which makes it possible to regulate the natural ventilation by opening of the door.

3. We used two-way dense row steel foundation, similar to raft foundation, it will allow the upper load evenly dispersed, and not to damage the original square paving under (stone).

Cedar planks(omitted anti-corrosion process) were arranged on the foundation, becoming the floor that can be sit around this quick-building building. Once again, the warmth of wood made the space easy to approach.

4. It is the conventional practice to use aluminum-magnesium manganese upright lock edge plate in the roof, and also guarantee the rain-resistance.

The weight is actually a pro not a con. Especially for the site on the seaside of Xiamen, where typhoon come from time to time, a heavy structure becomes a necessity. Therefore, the house should be light but the roof should be heavy, this pair of requirements seems to be contradictory, and still was balanced by the strong overall structural stiffness.

The 72 hours of live broadcast, along with the 720 hours of technical desk work and the running around in three places were indeed a moment of tension that we experienced together with the program team and the contractor. Together we faced the problems. Together we accomplished the events.

Yes, this essay is very “unarchitectural”. Maybe it’s more like a tedious narrative of the process of an event.

For the program, the Readers’ House is a special set of props, but for the architects, the house is more like a medium, or a window, that does have all the characteristics of a construction project as it should be, but also clearly strikes at the customary judgments of expertise.

This temporary building that has disappeared left us with only images and memories, but it seems to be able to pull out a lot of unconventional topics, like many light spots overlapping and flashing in the mind.

Initially, the architect's interest led us to propose a proposal similar to the "suitcase" space that can be loaded and unloaded lightly, in order to cope with the temporary and the idea of possible off-site reuse.