Z House
Z House, a house for the architect’s parents in rural Beijing, renovates a courtyard house and reframes its vernacular heritage for contemporary routines.
Set against wooded mountains of Dahuashan village, Z House preserves local heritage through careful renewal: from materiality and rhythm in the construction system, to the organization of domestic programs within the traditional “Courtyard House” type.
A 30-meter Ailanthus tree on site forms a “center of empathetic gravity”: to its north, a long house; to its south, an enclosed yard. The proposal is essentially a planimetric recalibration, tying together points and fields, movements and stillness, panoramic and framed views…a play of rhythm where layers of time, layers of domestic picturesque unfold. Z House is designed as a retirement home for two elderly residents throughout Spring, Summer and Fall seasons. Within a modest budget, it reinstates life on an abandoned site: major work includes reconstructing the perimeter wall and entry, landscaping, rebuilding the kitchen unit, and renovating the main house - a traditional Chinese timber/cobblestone construction typical in the rural north.
In heavily bent load-bearing beams, one can trace the wisdom of rural construction levering limited resources at hand. To celebrate the “táiliáng” (column-beam-and-strut) system’s structural, rhythmic and material beauty, the renovation maps its inherent logic and follows.
After repairing the structural members and replacing the rafters, we’ve prepared the skeleton for a new weather-proof envelope - standing seam metal roof and insulated window cladded like a piece of clothing. Previous 5 structural bays were reworked into 3 rooms, where walls stagger around wood stacks, allowing unobstructed expression of the timber framing. Steel framing continues to extend outward as flying eaves, forming a shaded veranda to the front, a service corridor to the back. Veneer bricks and stone foundations are restored as needed.
The kitchen is rebuilt in steel framing, with service areas to the back and a glass facade opening onto a concrete platform. The courtyard features a farm garden and patches of landscape gardens, in a dynamic connectivity of circulation routes. A gravel “river” flows over arrangements of rocks, plants, and paved fields, symbolizing greater nature in miniature.
