True and False Hospital
Courtyard VIRTUAL

The project is located in a theme garden that showcases traditional architecture, where various types and levels of Chinese classical-style buildings are fantastically juxtaposed. This project is to transform one of the courtyards into an architectural office, and the core issue of the design is set as how the architectural office is placed in such a "fake" building.

The real and fake courtyard is a criticism of superficial and even wrong imitation. This fake courtyard is regarded as a huge 1:1 simulation model, and is pushed to the extreme of modeling in the design: all the original building components are painted white, erasing their materiality, leaving only the form, and the replaced stained glass components become large-scale decorations. The gate and the outer wall are kept in their original state, so there is a huge perceptual contrast between the inside and outside of the gate: from the park, the courtyard is still a traditional old thing that seems real; while inside the courtyard, the false antique is sincerely told to the audience.

Courtyard VIRTUAL locates in a theme park where various types and classes of traditional Chinese buildings are piled together without context. This project is a renovation of one of the Beijing courtyard buildings into an office for an architecture firm, the key design issue is how to place an architecture firm into a 'fake' architecture.

As a criticism on the superficial or even wrong imitation, the original courtyard was viewed as a 1:1 scale architecture model, the idea of which was pushed to its extreme in this renovation: the original architecture elements are all painted white, retaining their forms, but erasing their material properties. The gate and the courtyard walls remain intact, leading to a strong contrast between inside and outside of the courtyard: from outside, the courtyard is still a traditional looking object, while from inside, its imitations are revealed to the visitors.