LIVING IN A CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

China has a huge cultural background and rich heritage, but nowadays there is a need to update the importance of some spaces, not only taking care of the aspect of the traditional buildings, but also for the essence and the atmosphere of other ones. Hutongs are traditional streets that are disappearing for the massive amount of new skyscrapers. There is no relation between this new towers and the street level.

To establish my design in the surroundings I kept in mind different factors. For instance, the dialogue between the existing facades and the ones that I’m designing, the hierarchy of public spaces and the location of the main accesses far from the main street.

Understanding the high variety of thresholds of the city made me realise that the urban structure was created by a ring pattern repeated all around, even in the housing scale. The traditional scheme has a main courtyard in the middle that helps organize all the rooms with hierarchy. Thereby, there is always a relation between indoors and outdoors. I took two main courtyards as a tool to reconnect and reactivate this interesting place of the neighbourhood following the ring urban structure.

There is a lack of facilities and public meeting places in the surroundings, so I created a new point of interest opened to the inhabitants who are living close by and for the whole city, generating a new center of social interaction.

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