Incision | Nantou City Guesthouse

Shenzhen, China

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Incision | Nantou City Guesthouse

Shenzhen, China

Firm

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office

Type

Hospitality + Sport › Hotel

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2021

SIZE

1000 sqft - 3000 sqft

Inspired by the vibrant milieu of the alleyways in Nantou City, the project seeks to reflect on the cultural heritage of the mundane. Scenes of the everyday—people, objects and their settings—are the primary source material for design. To celebrate life in the urban village, the existing structure was cut into as a massing strategy, allowing such “urban incisions” to foster a new public realm on the inside of the previously private apartment block. At the same time, the excavation revealed the many material layers and building structures as if at an archeological site, only to allow new interventions to instigate unexpected dialogues between the past and the present.

Like the bustling scenes in the alleyways below, the roofscape across the Nantou urban village has a life of its own, with makeshift gardens and vegetable farms popping up along the jagged skyline. To reframe views of this ever-evolving village, a flat floating roof is installed to create a dramatic panorama of the street life below, and a new public ground above. Housing public spaces and service functions, the metallic monoliths of the rooftop play on vernacular add-ons, which are much sought after by space-starved attic-level residents.

Old and new are juxtaposed throughout the building to celebrate ruins. Once the visitor arrives at the building, the public gesture of opening up the building along the urban axis is turned upward. An existing stairwell that had previously connected all nine tenement floors was now cut open and expanded to create a new vertical courtyard. A new metal stair suspended within the vertical courtyard takes the visitor on a journey to the guest rooms on the mid-levels, and finally to the public rooftop gardens.