Architecture Wednesday: Quishe Courtyard

The renovation project is located in a huton—a narrow street or alley—in an old quarter of Beijing. It's a small Siheyuan—a typical traditional Chinese residence—with three courtyards, roughy 50 feet wide and 137 feet deep. This home is called Qishe—‘Qi’ and ‘she’ respectively refers to "seven" and "house" in Chinese—because its address in the hutong is 7 and it originally consisted of 7 pitched-roof buildings. The Siheyuan before renovation was old and dilapidated,most of the roof, walls, doors and windows were badly damaged or missing, and the courtyards were filled with construction materials and weeds.

The design firm, ARCHSTUDIO, set two goals: to renovate the old and insert the new. They repaired all the surfaces, and reinforced the structure, with a view to reproducing a traditional Siheyuan. But they brought in new living spaces, bathrooms, a kitchen and garage, HVAC pipes and lines, as well as new veranda spaces.

A veranda—a basic element of traditional Chinese architectures—was embedded into the old Siheyuan to link up the seven separated pitched-roof houses, and serves as a circulation route. 

The front courtyard is mainly used as a garage, with its back wall removed, and entrance door shifted to one side. The design team restored and preserved many historical elements such as the gateway and carvings of the arched door opening, and even a dry tree. In addition, the wall between the front and middle courtyards were dismantled and replaced by a transparent veranda. 

The veranda features a curved plane which mimics the curved edges of the pitched roof, and forms several arc-shaped transparent spaces to integrate the houses, landscape and the sky into the same picture. In the front courtyard, part of the veranda's roof was bent down to form a curved wall, behind which are some functional spaces, including the washroom, service room, and equipment room.    

The middle courtyard is a public space. It previously contained three houses, but now holds the living room, tea room, dining room and kitchen. The dining room has a folding door, which can open the interior to the outside space completely; in the dining room's back wall is an arched door, which was restored, and is now the entrance to the back courtyard.

The back courtyard is a dwelling space, with two bedrooms, a tea room, and a study. The veranda in this area has an undulating plane, which interacts with the three old trees that already existed in the courtyard. The bedrooms are set at the furthest point of the house, with the bathroom in each adjacent to a small yard for light and ventilation.

The designers used original and new materials in rebuilding the house. The original pine wood framework of the Siheyuan was maintained, with its damaged components replaced by the same material. The new veranda, doors, windows and some furniture utilize laminated bamboo panels—looks like wood, but has the strength of steel—to echo the old pine. The newly built veranda adopts a frame structure, with ribbed beams and panels on the ceiling, in order to maximize transparency and lightness as well as to better blend into the old construction.

The old building walls were restored, by reusing the gray bricks from demolished temporary architectural blocks in the courtyards, and the floors of the outdoor spaces are paved with the same bricks; some new walls are made glass brick the same size as the old gray bricks.

It really was a labor of love to take this old, rundown, ready to be torn down, home, and turn it into a historical, yet very modern home.

Here’s a few Before and After photos, as well as the floorplan, which you can click to emBIGGERate …

ArchDaily