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Rethinking Tulou – Communal Garden

Part 1 Project 2019
Christie Ka Hei Ma
 University of Hong Kong | China
Tulous were the vernacular type of urban collective housing in Fujian, they are named as “mud house” in Chinese because of its unique use of rammed earth to build walls. More than 700 years ago, Tulous were the only architecture on the piece of rural land. As modern buildings started to rise, Tulous were trapped and sunken into the density of urbanised life.

This project imagines how a Tulou could be transformed and revitalised into a public communal garden. People are adopting a different lifestyle nowadays and it is important for us to realise a new role for the vernaculars and connect them back to the time and place.

Sometimes, renovation is about offering new opportunities by responding to the old with the
new, instead of concerning about how much of the old we conserve.

Christie Ka Hei Ma
Tutor(s)
2019
The place that we are living in right now is a fabric of layers weaving into each other. Everyone and everything exist for their own reason and have their own roles within it. We might be big at this moment but small at the other, sometimes we contain, s
The site has a combination of raw landscape like the mountains, productive nature like the farmland and roadside trees, but people do not get a chance to get close to nature and admire it.
Gu Feng Lou was built more than 700 years ago and is one of the oldest Tulou in the area. It is overall symmetrical and is supported by mud wall and wooden structures like many other Tulous.
After the transformation, the exterior might not change much to the wallaby , but the interior is filled with new spatial experiences to be discovered.
My design vision was to create a landscape hidden behind the thick fortified mud façade for the public to take a moment to stay away from the hustle and bustle of urban life and enjoy nature.
My decision was to demolish the wooden structures and interior mud walls, and build new walls within the exterior mud wall, so users will wander around the garden and discover the space by peeling the layers piece by piece.
A combination of materials is adopted in the design, including existing mud wall (white), concrete stairs (black), brick arcade (yellow), wood decks (blue) and landscape (pink).
The exterior is solid and the space starts to open up and becomes more porous towards the centre. The landscape being contained is exaggerated within three meters of difference for users to observe nature from various perspectives.
Inspired by flying buttresses of cathedrals, a new system of buttresses is developed within the concrete layer to provide lateral support for exterior mud wall, while adding interests to the walking experience through each of them.
The exterior mud wall is the only component that was kept, but the idea of layers and articulation of materials taken from the Tulou and the site remains.
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