Escape from the big city

The homeowner is a graphic designer couple. Unwilling to bear the high cost of living in Beijing and tired of serious big city hassles, she chose to return to her hometown, a two-line city life like Jinan. When we were talking about this house, or before the outbreak of the epidemic, the man said that we were busy running domestically and abroad, so long as the traffic was convenient, it didn't matter where it was. This house is both our office and our home.
Who knows, the epidemic broke out before the construction of the project. Attempting to change the type of space in a small room, this transformation played an unexpected role.
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Major Case

Because of the work characteristics of graphic designers, we set out to create a creative environment. It should have some feature that tries to minimize the restrictions of the environment on people's bodies, allowing multiple events to occur. Importantly, the new space should provide a large table where the owner can do most of the designer's work on it. Finally, we determined the size of the table according to the pattern of the tabletop: three sheets of plywood of 1.2 m x 2.4 m, stitched together into a giant sheet of 1.8 m x 4.8 m.

The Reshaping of Order

We are referring to the converted site as a very ordinary apartment building suite, the house was probably built in the early 20th century. Standard three-bedroom living room with kitchen and two bathrooms. The space is divided into several smaller units. This form of spatial order, like the vast majority of family spaces in this country, comes from the Netherlands in the 17th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Family life for the vast majority of working and middle class people. These families tend to maintain multiple family members, even three generations of children. But this is clearly inconsistent with the more unique appeal of the host couple, nor can it accommodate the “big case”.

Good structure in the original structural system as a short limb shear wall. This also means that in addition to the shear wall reinforced concrete segments that participate in the structural calculations, the rest of the filling wall can be removed. When we visited the site after cleaning, we found the apartment building as if transformed into a mountain body, and the rooms of three rooms and one room turned into a huge cave.

It reminds me of a scene from the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” where the Taglian family's ancestral home has a huge conference room on Dragon Stone Island, on a cliff top, a cave wrapped around the colossus: the wide space of the Chamber of the painted table and the unidirectional lighting that bring a kind of tranquility to the place. Focusing and self-centered.
Back at our site, removing the walls is the first step, and second, the whole design strategy is transformed into a crisply shaped space without separation. This change in spatial logic means that, first, separate small spaces are combined into a continuous whole, and the sense of scale of the room increases many times over. Second, the light and shadow locked on either side of the wall are transformed into continuous brightness and shadow. Third, individually empowered users live together again.
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Occupy the cave

The transformation of space still bears traces of the past. Indispensable obstacles, in addition to the short limb shear wall, there are also pipe wells. This determines that the approximate location of the toilet will not change. We expanded the area of the original toilet and wrapped it with a series of shelves and cabinets.
This huge device replaces the wall and becomes a seemingly incomparable partition in a continuous space. The location of the partition is close to the main entrance, naturally separating the work area and the bedroom. Between them is connected by a narrow narrow corridor. It's like a deep passage in a huge cave. And shear wall short limbs that cannot be eliminated in large spaces also become symbolic boundaries.
The enlarged kitchen, hidden rooms and the lobby that houses the megaliths are blurred together. The curtain system is used as a mobile divider between the different functional areas.
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All in order to save

The budget for this renovation project is only RMB 20,000, and the cost alone is less than $2,000. Therefore, we choose to minimize construction projects. Spend the money on the knife edge. The vast majority of use functions rely on fixed furniture that is processed in the field of sheet metal. In addition to the “Big Case”, there are plenty of bookshelves and shelves, including kitchen furniture, a bed and a multifunctional double-layer tatami. The size of the “Big Case” is too large for people to eat in person. We also designed a small dining table, which is usually hidden under the “Big Case”, which can be pulled out when needed. The main material of all wooden furniture is a relatively inexpensive birch multilayer board.

Cleaned off concrete floor ceilings and structural short walls, and after scraping off the putty, it gives a special texture, real and rough. AND THE NON-REMOVABLE BLOCK WALL BETWEEN THE NEIGHBORS IS VULNERABLE TO DEBRIS, WHICH WE APPLY DIRECTLY WITH THE BASE PLASTER AS A FINISHING SURFACE. The redistributed adjusted circuitry is not obscured, but directly exposed to the outside.

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A set of suspended wire, steel construction, and sheet metal finishes, a continuous box that runs along the entire house in the direction of the beam. It is both a bridge for new lines, powering high lights and low switch wiring boards, as well as a curtain box for soft dividing room curtains.
The floor material is the cheapest epoxy self-leveling resin, and the overall floor makes the cave-like space more continuous. Original European door security door, replaced with cheap steel fire doors. In order to increase the storage area on the countertop, the kitchen uses electrical ceramic wiring cups and steel cables as shelves. This materials and practices strategy keeps construction prices almost to a minimum. Even with some remaining expenses, we choose to use mosaic in the stain-resistant and waterproof interface of the kitchen. Exposed piping and switch sockets, we also found more refined metal components to replace commonly used plastic products.

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Although this is an interior transformation project, we still see him as one of a series of small residential projects in recent years, the continuity of spatial form and as a “tool” item. Eliminate all unnecessary separation, restore the space between the most basic structures, and then occupy it again. People move daily in a continuous space, between light changes, and behavioral events. This new attempt on the “living room” type freed people's bodies and dynamics to a greater extent. I think that this “local” liberation has played an appropriate role during the pandemic, especially for people who are quarantined at home.
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Project Information
Project Name: House of the Short Walls — The Cave That Wrapped the Giant Case
Project Type: Apartment Interior Renovation
Designer: Cazha Office
Project Design: 2020
Year of completion: 2021
Design Team: Direct
Project Address: Lecheng District, Jinan City, Shandong Province
Building Size: 130 ㎡
Photography Copyright: Direct
Partner: Structural Engineer: Koschäme
Material: Birch Plywood
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