The Tongxian Gatehouse was built over ten years ago, some 30 minutes outside of Beijing.  With the speed of expansion, the project now sits within the expanding footprint of the city, and what was a rural small town has become densified. With this advent, the rural roads have had to be widened. Given its heritage status, the Tongxian Gatehouse was moved back from the existing street about 60 ft.

This project is less than 2,000 square feet in size, but remains an important one in our work. It is maybe the most comprehensive proposal where we align the interest of geometry, program, form and tectonic unit into binding reciprocity, such that there emerges a more critical relationship between part and whole. Most notably, the main complex was never built. Another structure was built in its stead by Ai Wei Wei, who also served as our local expediter for the gatehouse.

For construction photos by Nathan Willock, click here.

Photos by Nathan Willock.

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Archinect’s Working out of the Box series previously featured Moneta Ho, a classic MIT grad, who has taken her architectural knowledge base as a platform for other parallel practices beyond the realm of buildings.  Along with other peers, such as Matthew Trimble (Radlab founder), Axel Kilian and Carl Lostritto, MIT continues to imagine alternative futures for architectural applications.  Read more on Archinect!

Image via Archinect

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I have been passing some websites and reading back and forth with people and thought it might interest others out there.  So here it goes:

GRASP article is my favorite one so far.  I have read it about once a day for a week. Dezeen post on architects and social media is also an excellent read.  Browsing through Molo shop is inspiring.

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Tongva Park is an impressive new project by Field Operations at the corner of Colorado and Ocean Ave. in Santa Monica.  Besides its stunning location and diverse amenities and horticulture, it caught our eye for its implementation of welded flat bar fence and lattice enclosures.  NADAAA had ambitions to implement similar parallax and gradient effects in steel along the sides of some of the bridges during the Cornell U. and City of Ithaca Bridges Means Restriction Project. These plans ultimately did not fit the client’s goals for the project, so it was satisfying to see a similar design realized elsewhere.

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Last October, NADAAA submitted its design for the Parramatta Square Competition. Although the design was not selected, it was a great exercise in NADAAA’s continual commitment for its projects to engage with urbanism, constructing a dialogue between building and landscapes at one scale, as well as skylines and urban formations at another. Visit the project page for design concept and images.

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