Riverside House

Beijing, China

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Riverside House

Beijing, China

Firm

氙建筑 xian architects

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2024

SIZE

0 sqft - 1000 sqft

BUDGET

$50K - 100K

It is a small village on the suburbs of Beijing with mountains to the north and south. A river called Jiudu River runs through it. Nestled in the southern area is the primary cluster of homes, while our project site is north of the river, surrounded by a sizeable trout house, a home party house and a local village house.

River is the most ancient road. With our own limited understanding, we can sense that it has no clear origin and no specific destination, especially emphasizing the endless and protracted nature of it. The flowing river is not for admiration(/appreciation), but for companionship. The river meanders and forms numerous inlets, which is why it is named Jiudu River. A small house lies adjacent to the primal force and the momentum of Nine Bends River.

The mountain to the north manifests as Gaunt, Exposed to the wild, Great silence, Dark energy - which distinctively maps the emblematic geological features of northern China's terrain.How to coexist without vulnerability to embrace the unconscious tides of daily existence?

Between the cliffside and waterside, an geometrically carved rock-like architecture takes shape in the mind. The site calls for an abstract architecture, echoing an instinctive response to the primal landscape. An abstract, awe-inspiring “object” was envisioned, to safeguard its inherent solidity and strength. Exude a sense of pride, responding to the rugged and powerful northern terroir culture.

The "Urban Luggage" was deconstructed into individual rooms, creating multi-layered psychological distances through meandering paths, independent defense of each other, cantilevered roof slabs, drastic proportional adjustments within compact spaces, and void-solid interplay.
By weighing the volumetric relationships of the three building masses, canopies for their adjacent neighbors and an elevated terrace are simultaneously achieved through spatial positioning and depth configurations. The terrace and the cantilevered roof at the top level together forms a profound cavity transforming outward landscape into a focused inward gaze.
All of the architectural gestures aimed to extract the pure intensity of nature amidst the complexity: roaring skies, distilled shadows, and silent winds.

From the moment we first entered the field, something began to shape our intuition high-intensity. Arriving at the northeast corner of the second-floor terrace, where concrete walls rise to form a third terminus beyond the twin solid volumes, the Stargazing Platform invokes the ”heaven and earth”, receiving the divine arrival.

As the physical homestead no longer embodies the essential elements of daily life familiar to all, a new dimension of “heaven and earth” is gradualy unfolding. Now the fields are gone, we lean on heaven and earth.