The project is located in Xiaogan City, Hubei province. The site is a typical hilly terrain in Jianghan Plain.At the beginning of the project, the designer chose the construction base at the side of the pond opposite the township road after examining the terrain, hoping that the vehicle from expressway, after turning into this country road which planted with populus, could see the whole picture of the building in the first eye, thus forming a relationship between the scenery.
The ladder ridge became an important natural element in the design, and the Chief Designer Li Tao put a long strip on the three level ridge height of the pond, and the two level space of the inner courtyard was formed naturally by the 1500 height difference which retained intentional. The height difference is also a direct reaction to the external image of the building – sloping roofs,which is in the lower side of the cornice, correspond to the lower side of the ridge, the cornice height is 4 meters, the higher cornice correspond to the higher side of the ridge, and the height of 6 meters; and the internal height difference has different expression mode in different spaces. This way objectively reflects the function and rhythm of space.
The height of the eaves on one side is 4 meters high, the total length of the building is 104 meters, the proportion of length and height has formed the greatest feature of this project: the building seems to lie on the side of the pond to form a low level and modest image; at the same time, the main building is parallel to the Township Road, and from the Township Road, many horizontal lines gather: the guardrails of the township road. The border line of the pond, a few levels of ridge in front of the building, the cornice line on the water side of the building , the cornice line on the high side of the building, the horizontal line of the roof of the inner and entrance corridors, and the horizontal line of the viewing platform of the building roof. These horizontal lines strengthen the characteristics of hilly terrain in Jianghan Plain.
Under the unified roof, the designer organized five boxes, two inner yards, three corridors, a straight run staircase, and the “remaining space” of these physical boxes and roofs, forming an external image of restraint, and the interior of a particularly rich wandering space. The five boxes follow the rhythm of scale: big, small, the biggest, small, and then big. The “remaining space” between the five boxes, formed a different rhythm because of the height of the roof and the box, the size of the inner and outer rice fields, the penetration and occlusion of the line of sight, and the opening and the dense contrast of the sloping roof.
The design of this project is not only a single architectural design, but also an attempt to design integrated architecture, landscape, and interior design from the beginning of the planning by UAO, and the layout of the vertical and traffic lines of the site is organized reasonably, the landscape has retained the texture of the paddy field, and the original village’s threshing ground is reformed to form a campfire square. Relying on the original terrain and trees, the new plant space density relationship is combed, which makes the process of building to be a kind of expectation; the architecture relies on the logic of the ridge height, which makes the interior design come to a drainage, the space rhythm runs through, the subsequent interior deepening, more consideration of the overlapping and closing of the materials. Inside and outside of the space and the texture is the sense of unity.