About this book
Beijing's hutongs—the courtyard-and-alley fabric of the old inner city—sit on a fault line between demolition and preservation. Zhang Ke's practice, ZAO/standardarchitecture, has spent years working at the smallest possible scale within them: the makeshift structures residents themselves added to courtyards over the past 60 years.
The anchor project here is the Hutong Children's Library and Art Centre, which won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016. Around it the book sets the Micro Hutong, the Co-living Courtyard and the practice's social housing work in central Beijing. The argument implicit in the title is that a city is a living organism, and that renewal at this scale is metabolism rather than surgery.
Key features
- The Micro Hutong Renewal series documented through photographs and drawings by the architect
- Foreword by Farrokh Derakhshani, director of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture
- Interviews with residents and users of the hutong projects, across generations
- Around 150 illustrations, full colour
What you'll discover
- How a children's library and art centre was inserted into an existing courtyard without erasing it
- Kenneth Frampton on small worlds built at the threshold between house and public building
- Martino Stierli on the architectural model as exhibition object, via MoMA's acquisition of a hutong model
- Zhang Ke in conversation with Nondita Correa Mehrotra on metabolism, Charles Correa and non-Western narratives
About the contributors
Essays and conversations come from Farrokh Derakhshani, Mohsen Mostafavi, Kenneth Frampton, Martino Stierli, Nondita Correa Mehrotra, Zhang Ke, Kristin Feireiss, Hans-Jürgen Commerell and Amanda Ju. Zhang Ke founded ZAO/standardarchitecture in Beijing in 2001.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Dimensions: 170 × 245 mm
- Pages: 288
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783966800150
- Publisher: ArchiTangle
- Publication date: September 2021
Perfect for
Architects working on adaptive reuse and small-scale urban insertion, readers following contemporary Chinese practice, and anyone interested in what happens to historic city fabric when it is neither frozen nor cleared.