Passing through historic Beijing neighborhoods, seeing only the preserved street-facing facade, you’d never know that surprisingly modern structures contrast with aging surfaces within the courtyards just out of sight. Instead of just demolishing the ‘hutong’ courtyard houses found only in this Chinese city, architects are adapting them to modern life, slotting houses, hostels, museums, tea houses, cinemas and more under the existing roofs.

Tea House by Archstudio

In a truly stunning adaptation, Archstudio has completed a tea house and cafe within an existing hutong house, enclosing it from above with new roofs while leaving atriums open for bamboo and other greenery. The intervention connects the site’s five existing structures with a glazed corridor following the path of the original courtyard, forming three tea houses with their own unique views.

Twisting Courtyard by Archstudio

A river of glossy grey bricks streams through the courtyard of a Siheyuan house in the Paizihutong area of Beijing, upgrading the historic architecture with spaces that meet modern requirements of living. Archstudio‘s stunning pathway arches over the new volumes and even continues right into the dining room as part of the floor.

Mini Hostel Inside Hutong by ZAO / standardarchitecture

The firm ZAO / standard architecture inserted a small hostel inside a renovated Beijing hutong, exploring the potential of small-scale accommodations that slot right into the city’s existing architecture instead of displacing it. The glazed facades of volumes made of board-formed concrete project into the courtyard, facing each other (in some cases, with views of toilets, much to the horror of many Westerners looking at these images.) “The result is an architectural operation that brings back the courtyard as generator of the program, as it activates the building by creating a direct relationship with its urban context.”

Lai Yard House by Minggu Design

Tucked away behind weathered brick facades near the ancient city wall of Beijing, this courtyard home was crumbling. Minggu Design protects and preserves the original Chinese architecture while enhancing and adapting it for the 21st century, inserting volumes made of wood and glass to complement the surroundings without overpowering them. They used the new volumes to intentionally block and filter light to the original interior, creating a tranquil cave-like feel.

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Preserving Architectural Gems 8 Beijing Hutong Plug Ins Update Historic Shells

Putting architecture into the hands of the people in a country where home ownership is typically out of reach, this studio has some incredibly innovative ideas, from modular units that ‘plug in’ to the envelopes of historic buildings to unexpected uses for cheap and plentiful materials. These 10 projects by People’s Architecture Office explore the convenience of prefabrication, multipurpose objects and the brilliance of simplicity while still offering structures that are bright, fresh, airy and comfortable.

Courtyard House

In Beijing, a whole lot of historic architecture has simply been cast aside in favor of newer, cleaner, more spacious suburban housing. Once-vibrant neighborhoods lacking in simple infrastructure like sewer systems are being left behind and neglected, growing more and more dilapidated. PAO has one solution: modern modular units that simply ‘plug in’ to the existing architecture to make it more livable. In the case of ‘Courtyard House,’ the original buildings are used like an envelope for newer structures that can be quickly, cheaply and easy assembled on-site.

Plugin House

The firm carried the same concept over to ‘Plugin House,’ which slots onto a tiny, awkwardly shaped plot in a traditional ‘hutong’ alleyway. The prefabricated panels used to create these structures already have insulation, plumbing, windows, doors, wiring, interior and exterior finishes built in, and they snap and lock together with no more than a single hex wrench. People who no prior construction experience can put one of these houses together in 24 hours, and it costs less than $10,000.

Plugin Tower

Plugin Tower is another PAO project that easily fits into existing urban environments, and gets around the difficulty of stable housing in China, where land is held exclusively by the government and building private homes is only affordable to the wealthy. This structure requires no foundation, so it doesn’t need planning approval, and it can be picked up and moved to a new location. The prefabricated steel frame comes in a kit of parts, and the modular living units just plug right in. You can rearrange it however you like and expand it when necessary.

Container Pavilion

Shipping containers are cheap, easy to procure, highly stackable, customizable and a breeze to transport, so it’s no surprise that PAO has made use of them. This cantilevered pavilion consists of six yellow units overlapping six red units in a perpendicular arrangement, creating shaded areas on the ground and a series of rooftop recreation spaces. The ends of each unit are glazed for views of the city and sightless through the entire building.

Hutong Insert: Beijing Culture and Art Center

PAO uses its skills in inserting modular units into historic structures in their proposal for the Beijing Culture and Art Center, set within a traditional hutong house. A competition to design the project called for a solution that would renovate the building while retaining as much of its original character as possible; PAO’s proposal makes it easy to add lots of interior space without disturbing much of the outer structure at all.

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Architecture For The People 10 Subversive And Imaginative Designs For China

Despite the emergence of highways, shopping malls, frighteningly deep pits and even moats around them, the tenacious owners of these older structures refused to give in to developers, remaining in their increasingly incongruous homes. In China, they’re referred to as ‘nail houses,’ like stubborn nails in wood that can’t be pounded down; American developers call them ‘spikes.’ Most of them are ultimately demolished, but some stand like strange little monuments to the past.

Edith Macefield’s ‘Up’ House, Seattle

Framed on three sides by concrete, Edith Macefield’s tiny cottage in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle is strikingly out of place. But really, what’s out of place is the development that has sprung up around her 108-year-old farmhouse, which served as inspiration for the Pixar movie ‘Up’. Macefield purchased the house in the ’50s and lived there until her death in 2008, even after the rest of the homes on her street were gone, refusing to give in to developers who ultimately ramped up their compensation offers to $1 million plus a new home and nursing care for the rest of her life. Macefield felt she was too old and frail to move. But during the last years of her life, she struck up a friendship with the superintendent of the construction project, and left her home to him. Instead of allowing it to be swallowed by the complex, he sold it to someone who turned it into an office. As of 2014, the house still stands.

Luo Baogen House

Drivers cruising along a highway in Wenling, China, had to slow down and drive around one heck of an unusual roadblock: the five-story home of duck farmer Luo Baogen, the sole holdout from a neighborhood that was demolished to make way for the new thoroughfare. When Luo refused developers’ offers, they simply built around him, assuming that being in the middle of a construction zone and later, a highway would drive him out. In the end, it was all the media attention that did it. Despite having paid $95,000 to build it just a few years earlier, Luo accepted an offer of $41,000 and consented for the house to be razed.

Pinghe Crossroads House, Fujian Province, China

What happens when multiple people own space in a single building, and some sell while others won’t? In some cases, builders literally tear down everything but the sliver of the structure belonging to the holdout. This jagged nail house at a crossroads in Pinghe, China is all that’s left of an entire apartment building.

Austin L. Spriggs House, Washington D.C.

A tiny townhouse clung to its little plot of land in Washington D.C. even as a four-story-deep crater appeared around it, with just three feet of earth separating its walls from a 40-foot drop-off. Owner Austin L. Spriggs, who used the building as an office for his architecture firm, refused to even engage with the developers, who finally decided they would just build around it. It’s now a curiosity crammed between condos and commercial buildings. In 2011, it sold for $800,000 to someone who plans to turn it into a restaurant.

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Holdout Houses 10 Stubborn Structures That Wont Make Way

On any given day in Paris, you might see hundreds of thousands of  residents and tourists in the streets. They go in and out of shops, snap pictures next to landmarks, stare in wonder at the opulent architecture. But over 5500 miles away, there is another Paris – a comparative ghost town where the streets stand nearly empty.

Construction on Tianducheng, in China’s Zhejiang district, began in 2007. It was meant to be a luxurious gated community resembling Paris in every way possible. The highlight of the town is its 354-foot replica of the Eiffel tower, but plenty of Paris’ other landmarks have been faithfully recreated here.

There is a major incongruity between one’s expectations for a “little Paris” and what you will actually see in Tianducheng. The streets are, for the most part, entirely empty. There are no throngs of tourists or business people rushing off to their offices. There is a lot of quiet, and there is a fair amount of traditional Chinese culture, seemingly completely out of place in the French surroundings.

The development was built to house 100,000 people and to draw rural families into a bustling metropolitan area. As of 2007, (the last time the population was counted), only 2,000 souls inhabited the gated compound. The population seems to be dwindling, leading local media to refer to Tianducheng as a “ghost town.”

It may seem odd to build a replica of a famous city in a different country, but the developers were working on the idea that Paris was seen as a romantic destination. They felt that Chinese people would want to live in this faux-European environment with its stately townhouses and wide-open courtyards. Several other Western-style towns and communities have been built in China around this idea.

At least in Tianducheng, you are more likely to see empty streets and traditional Chinese agricultural life than the distinctly Parisian pastimes of shopping, strolling, and sipping wine on a restaurant patio. Daily life in the town is documented in the video above.

Work is still in progress in the compound; its expected completion date is in 2015. So the Paris of the East, it turns out, isn’t quite a ghost town – it hasn’t had the time to develop ghosts just yet. In a few years, this now-quiet development could very well be chock full of Chinese residents ready to begin their European-style lives. (Images via: Business Insider and video by Caspar Stracke)

It’s been called the Dubai of northern China, showered with wealth, packed with public infrastructure and located near to precious natural resources in a region plagued by water-supply troubles. But the urban center of Ordos City, known as ‘Kangbashi New Area’, has been mostly deserted for five years. Kangbashi isn’t a ghost town due to economic issues, contamination or any other common cause of such abandonment – the government simply can’t convince people to move there.

Built for 1 million people and currently inhabited by just a few thousand (despite a government claim of 28,000 residents, who are more likely just commuting workers), Kangbashi is filled with brand new buildings. One apartment building after another perches on the edge of streets that rarely see traffic, skyscrapers stand empty and over $5 billion worth of public buildings are unused and unstaffed.

(images via: archdaily)

One notable architectural project, the Ordos Art Museum, was the first structure to go up in the new civic center. Its ethereal location on a stretch of sand dunes along a lake makes it all the more visually striking. But this 29,000-square-foot exhibition and research space is just accumulating dust until the city’s hoped-for residents move in.

(image via: time)

Even now, construction on Kangbashi homes, businesses and public buildings still continues. City officials are confident that it’s just a matter of time before many of the 1.5 million residents of Ordos proper, who live 15 miles away in the old section of town, see the light. The Ordos city government has already moved its offices there, but that’s the extent of life in the new town.

(image via: google maps)

“It’s pretty lonely here,” Li Li, the marketing manager of an elegant restaurant in Kangbashi’s mostly vacant Lido Hotel, told The New York Times. “Most of the people who come to our restaurant are government officials and their guests. There aren’t any common residents around here.”

(image via: time)

Kangbashi’s local economy should be flourishing, given its close proximity to abundant natural resources like natural gas and coal. As in much of the rest of China, real estate in Ordos is booming, and the apartments in Kangbashi aren’t empty for lack of buyers.

(image via: time)

Investors have snapped up nearly every available residence, confident that they’ll eventually see a big return. But it’s exactly this activity that has analysts worried about a speculative real estate bubble that will inevitably see a painful pop.

(images via: google maps)

On Google Maps, you can explore the vacant city’s complex layout, intricate landscaping and wealth of public spaces like parks, swimming pools and a massive town square. The land is still raw in many areas as construction marches on, and what few cars can be seen are clustered around government buildings. New highways cut into sparsely populated countryside.

(image via: time)

So why don’t people want to live here, in a sparkling state-of-the-art city filled with modern architecture? Mostly, for now, moving to Kangbashi is an inconvenience. The new district is a thirty-minute drive from the old district where the bulk of Ordos residents still live, and the slow pace of relocation has stalled important supporting services like restaurants and markets.

(image via: time)

It may seem like a bizarre folly on behalf of the Chinese government, borne of severely misplaced optimism. But Ordos is indeed expanding at a rapid pace, home to a growing number of coal millionaires and producing China’s highest gross domestic product per capita. And pouring money into such new urban areas is part of a plan by China’s government to increase its middle class, benefiting the nation’s economy as a whole. Despite the current eerie silence of its streets, it’s probably safe to say that Kangbashi won’t be empty for long.