This project is located in Kang Yuan, Kang Youwei's former residence in Danzao Town, Foshan City. It was originally an auxiliary building specially designed for Kang Yuan. It is positioned as the gate and tourist center for the complex. This transformation is accompanied by the further activation and use of the building, hoping to make it not only serve as the supporting facilities for the park but also as a cultural space that can serve the surrounding communities.
From Enclosed to Open
The existing building’s design follows the traditional Ningnan style architecture with subdivided rooms, a symmetrical layout, and a courtyard at the centre. The windows and doorways with perforated ornaments aggravate the fragmentation of the interior space. In order to activate the space inside and make it more public, our primary goal for the transformation is to remove the visual barriers of the original building to improve the permeability of visitors’ sightline across the whole building.
Meanwhile, the client tasked us to avoid any large-scale renovation that would change the appearance of the original building and escalate the project cost. With all things considered, we developed a set of a visual accessibility calculation model to evaluate different design schemes; this tool helped us to decide which walls and windows to be removed or expanded. In the end, the building’s visual permeability was improved with a limited amount of demolition. At the same time, the scheme creates circulation path that is much more suitable for a bookstore design.
Beyond Tradition and Chinese-style
The name of this project comes from the story that Mr. Kang Youwei used to read "Yizhui” (Yizhui refers to the amount of pages Mr. Kang poked through with a bookbinding awl) mount of books every day. As a place that carries Mr. Kang's thoughts and ideology, we wanted the overall design of the bookstore to reflect his beliefs inside. Therefore, the interior of the space was designed to follow Mr. Kang Youwei's initiative of "Chinese style and western use". As the core component of a bookstore, the design of the bookshelves referenced the Dom-Ino system in modernist architecture first pioneered by Le Corbusier.
While trying to marry the pseudo-classical architectural design with the new additions with western architectural language, we did not deliberately pursue one style over the other, but rather treating the existing building as a relic and adopted the way of juxtaposition and grafting, so that the two can harmoniously coexist. The bookstore design not only retains the pseudo-classical charm of the original building but also solved needs for leisure and culture within a contemporary public space.
