Kunshan Jijiadun Guesthouse
The project is located on the western edge of Jijiadun Village in Kunshan. The village sits at the periphery of the Dianshan Lake water system, with an intricate network of waterways extending throughout the settlement.
Jijiadun does not have a particularly long history. Most of its houses were built successively after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Shaped by the rural homestead policy, these houses are largely uniform in both size and appearance. Typically, they occupy a footprint of approximately 150 square meters, rise two stories in height, and feature double-pitched timber-framed tiled roofs with stucco walls. These recurring volumes form the primary point of analogy for the project.
Small rivers run along the southern and western edges of the site. Across the river to the west lies a dense grove of camphor trees, beyond which stretch vast rice fields. To the north and east, several other hotels are currently under construction. Within this context, the project must shield itself from undesirable and unstable landscape conditions while opening toward the more scenic views, making the overall layout a crucial design consideration.
The project has a total floor area of 1,300 square meters, comprising 24 guest rooms and 4 public lounges with kitchens. These functions are distributed across four buildings arranged in a rotating layout. Given the density of the guest rooms, the design requires simultaneous consideration at three different scales: the scale of the village, the scale of the hotel compound, and the scale of the individual room interior. Across all three scales, privacy, views, and spatial experience are studied in parallel throughout the design process.
As a result, a dynamic relationship is established among foreground, middle-ground, and background scenery at each of these three scales. Meanwhile, the building layout evolves simultaneously through massing, interior organization, and micro-topography, gradually reaching a stable configuration during the design process.
In its choice of construction system, the project does not imitate the traditional dwellings of the Yangtze River Delta, such as masonry walls of brick and stone combined with timber roof structures. Instead, it adopts low-cost industrialized building materials commonly used in contemporary villages, including concrete beam-column structures and light-gauge steel. At the same time, drawing on the refined local woodworking traditions that still persist today, the doors, windows, and interior furniture are fabricated on site. These choices are intended to resonate with the present-day rural landscape while evoking a sense of authenticity for contemporary “urban immigrants,” who form the hotel’s potential clientele.
The hybrid construction system responds not only to budget constraints and limited rural supply chains, but also to the realities of local construction. Expressive steel balconies are used to enhance the sense of building quality and compensate for the imprecision of on-site masonry work. Site-made woodwork, applied to the envelope, partitions, and furniture, makes full use of local fabrication while creating layered spatial experiences that blur the boundary between indoors and outdoors.
CREDITS
Architectural and Interior Design: Atelier XUK
Architects in Charge: LIU Kenan,ZHANG Xu
Design Team: LI Ang,WANG Yekaig, XU Yifei,SHI Xiaoxia,SHA Weiqi
Structural Design: MIAO Jianbo,CHEN Tong
MEP Design: YU Xiaoming
