23Wan Rock Hotel is located in Shaodong Village, Hufu Town, Yixing City. The village is naturally formed and is located between the canyons on both sides. The design task was to reuse one of the old abandoned buildings and transform it into a hotel. The building site was formed by excavating the mountain and leveling it. During the design, we considered how to stitch the relationship between the existing building and the surrounding villages and give the site new life.
The temporality of architecture is a very challenging and speculative proposition, and its unique value is even more evident under today's social cognition of involution and anxiety. As the philosopher Karsten Harries said, "Architecture is not just about taming space, it is also about resistance to people's fear of time. Beauty is an eternal reality that transcends time." In order to illustrate this point of view, the design team started from old and new memories, unfolded in the flow of materials, deduced in the logic of sequence, and looked for symbiosis in the game of man-made strategies and nature, leaving something "unfinished" waiting for time to continue the work.
We hope to make as few changes as possible to the old building so that the building can return to nature: we then "cover" the old building with a lightweight metal mesh. The metal mesh provides a "path" for the growth of vines. The plants grow freely, and the architect leaves.
