Qian Men is the front or south gate of the inner city of old Beijing. The site of the project is on the outside of the Qian Men along the central axis of the city. The traditional Hutong (alleyways) + Siheyuan (courtyards) fabric was mostly cleared away before this round of development and the residential nature of the area is also being changed to the commercial; therefore, this cannot be a simple effort of conventional preservation of what was there. What demand safekeeping are the city’s spatial structure, its urban experience and life style. Specifically, the following two sets of relationships are addressed: The New and the Old Fourteen existing structures are conserved and restored on the site. The majority of buildings on the site have to be new construction thus contemporary architecture with its materials, textures, and colors reminiscent of the old. While the density must be more than doubled, the scale of the urban spaces, the widths of the Hutong in particular, is made sure to remain as intimate as in the past. In the design process, the urban fabric is prioritized over the architectural details to achieve historic continuity. The Private and the Public Siheyuan used to be a private outdoor living room in the dwelling and is now incorporated in the design as a part of the public realm. The traditional family life tended to unfold in a singular Siheyuan whereas the present-day visitors will meander through layers of courtyards. The architecture of the new Siheyuan serves as an extension of the Hutong and develops varieties of journeys of connected courtyards or alternate layers of indoor and outdoor spaces. In other words, architectural space flows from the Hutong into Siheyuan. The relationship between Hutong and Siheyuan is intact spatially but reinvented in term of experience at the same time. Urban and architectural design guidelines becomes to an important tool to allow different participating architects to interpret the urban heritage with freedom yet maintaining a sense of consistency on both urban and architectural levels.
