Archinect - News

MAD Architects' second “Hutong Bubble” pops up in a renovated Beijing courtyard home

2019-11-22T18:22:00-05:00

With the completion of Hutong Bubble 218, MAD Architects made one step forward with their Beijing 2050 proposal, which they introduced during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. The latest Hutong Bubble project features metallic “bubbles” embedded on the rooftop of a 305-square-meter traditional hutong courtyard house that MAD restored and reconstructed. Located in Beijing's Qianmen East area, the home dates back to the Qing Dynasty and has dealt with degradation and demolition from the Chinese capital's rapid development.

Ten years after MAD's first hutong bubble popped up in Beibingmasi, Hutong Bubble 218 aims to demonstrate how small-scale interventions can create new spaces and programs for the local community, as well as form a dialogue between old and new.

Photo: Tian Fangfang.

Hutong Bubble 218 is located in the neighborhood off of Xidamochang alley. Built on a 469 square-meter site, the building was the city's first international hospital for over a ...

A new urbanism in the Global South

2017-08-16T15:43:00-04:00

But what is the repertoire of concepts, ideas and visions that inform the work of urban planners in the Global South — in Asia, Latin America and Africa? Are they still under the spell of their colonial and postcolonial masters? Or have they developed their own ideas and their own yardsticks, commensurate with the respective culture of their country and region?

"This insight leads to the most important quality of sustainable urban planning in countries of the Global South," urban planning expert Einhard Schmidt-Kallert writes in his commentary piece on Citiscope, arguing that "Planners need to develop urban planning visions that take into consideration the needs of all citizens, of the urban middle class as well as those of the urban poor in informal settlements. Those visions need to translate these needs into a comprehensive concept plan for an entire city, thus overcoming fragmentation and segregation."

The Courtyard House Plug-In: A House Within The House

2014-11-12T13:48:00-05:00

The Courtyard House Plug-in is a modular home that was created by People’s Architecture Office to respond to the need of Beijing’s historic neighborhoods for modern facilities. [...] This sort of living solution comes in handy when renovating old protected buildings and presents an alternative to tearing them down. “Houses tend to degrade when they’re vacant and unkempt,” says Shen, so plug-ins may help keep places like Hutongs alive despite their beat up look.

Abitare China#34 | HUTONG/adaptation

2013-11-04T23:36:00-05:00

ABITARE China magazine invited MovingCities to guest edit its 34th issue on the topic of "(re) Design Heritage – Strategies of Urban Renewal and the Chinese City." Published in October 2013, MovingCities took this opportunity to address one of the most urgent issues to discuss when dealing with the urban, architectural, cultural, social and economical development of China and the city of Beijing 北京: heritage, preservation, adaptive strategies and the hutong 胡同.

Formal definition of hutong: Hutongs are a type of narrow streets or alleys, most commonly associated with Beijing, China. In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences. Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods.

MovingCities choose "HUTONG /Adaptation" as the unifying theme for this themed issue, wishing to approach this much debat...

Editor's Picks #320

2013-06-19T12:19:00-04:00

For the latest edition of the Student Works: series Archinect featured the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) library pavilion, located on a sloping lawn on the temporary Dover Campus. The gridshell structure designed by City Form Lab had to accommodate three mature trees and forms a noise barrier toward the Ayer Raja Expressway in the north. Especially noteworthy we read "The pavilion is designed to be dismantled and recycled after two years". For his part TED liked what he saw writing "Nice stuff - well done"...

News
American Public Media’s Marketplace examined the resurgence of Midtown, a small pocket of Detroit that is thriving.

observant believed "There is such a dichotomy between Bloomfield Hills et. al. and the decaying part of the core...The city is probably more in need of urban designers, planners, sociologists, and economists at this point than it is starchitects producing concepts for individual buildings".

The NYT reported that the Pritzker Pr...

Wang Shu, China's Champion of Slow Architecture

2013-06-14T13:57:00-04:00

The day after Chinese architect Wang Shu was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s equivalent of a Nobel, in May 2012, he returned to the old Beijing neighborhood where he grew up and found it in the process of being demolished. The hutong, with its maze of narrow streets and traditional courtyard houses, was being sacrificed to make room for a new philosophy center.

Related Blog post on Archinect: Beijing Rising - Of Walls and Walkways

Zhongnanhai, protected by demolished

2012-02-10T17:25:00-05:00

About 200 meters east of his doorstep, behind a high red wall under the perennial watch of large, uniformed men in unmarked vans, was Zhongnanhai, a sprawling, closed compound home to the offices and reception halls of the central leadership of China. "They must have run out of space," Sun said, flicking away his cigarette.

Prompted by the recent destruction of 24 Beizongbu Hutong Jonathan Kaiman examines the preservation challenges faced by Beijing's hutongs. Specifically, the historic neighborhoods adjacent to Zhongnanhai, a sprawling, closed compound home to the offices and reception halls of the central leadership of China, have since 2005 become a demolition and construction zone. All this despite being listed on the Beijing City Master Plan, passed in 2005, as a demolition-safe "historical and cultural protected area”.

The destruction of 24 Beizongbu Hutong

2012-02-06T20:53:00-05:00

“A replica will be built,” one official unapologetically told the state news media.

Preservationists in Beijing awoke last weekend to find that the house of the famous architects and intellectuals Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin has been reduced to rubble. The two architects educated in America returned to China and established an architecture school in the northeastern city of Shenyang. One of Mr. Liang's most recognizable creation is the Monument to the People’s Heroes located in the center of Tiananmen Square.