Hutong Home for the Elderly and the Children

The project explores new possibilities of transforming a Dazayuan, in order to preserve and improve the conditions of the messy courtyard. The aim is to establish a public facility for the local inhabitants of HouHai, a communal accessible space desperately needed by the neighbourhood. This aim is approached in the project by two means, by applying a compacted infrastructure system indoor (i.e. freestanding service core), in order to provide services to the local people. The modular system contains a toilet, kitchen, washing machine and a small library and it could be reproduced and inserted into many other traditional hutong housing projects. The project and the exhibition carried out during the Beijing Design Week became the means to test the service core in a specific location of the proposed community house for the elderly and the young. The aim of the design is also to insert a covered linkage into the courtyard, to establish the interaction between the local inhabitants of the HouHai area.