New Office of Atelier Heimat
The project is located in the urban fringe in a cultural and creative park outside the East Fifth Ring Road in Beijing. The cultural and creative park used to be a chemical plant. Most of the buildings in the park are simple geometry in shape with large spacing. The object is a relatively small building sitting in the southeast corner of the Park, which encloses a small square with two white industrial siloes in the south side.
The existing building is a single storey building, covering an area of 160 square meters, with a cornice height of 5.8 meters. The high spatial scale and the light stray of the damaged roof strongly attract us and stimulate the imagination of the future space; at the same time, we learn that the target of the park is to transform the productive plant into a community-based cultural and creative park, the joint forces of the two factors as mentioned above, make us to rent it as our office. We hope that the isolated building can make a positive response to the environmental atmosphere in the process of this design, so that the internal and external communities of the building and the nature can involve a variety of spatial connections.
Because we rented it as our office, budget and simple construction are important considerations at the beginning of our design. Materials and related construction methods, personnel organization, equipment and tools, process skills, etc., become the origin for us to tap the design potential. The materials are generally low-cost industrial building materials, such as square steel, corrugated insulation panel, light weight polystyrene particle sandwich wall panel, cement fiberboard, etc., which are the common choice of materials in the urban fringe.
The architects adjust the space and human's behavior and perception with the smallest operation of design and the least increases of element. The sawtooth roof extends to the sky and the skylight invites the sunlight into the room with the light and shadow switching; the openings of the four external walls are different, which responds to the different surrounding environment, the design intends to create rich spatial levels to implement the possibility for people to stay and communicate by the openings, the garden and the gray space under the awning, which can transform the original productive house into a community building.
