This villa is located in plot ORDOS project.
Architects: OBRA Architects Location: Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China Principals in Charge: Pablo Castro, Jennifer Lee Project team: Shin Kook Kang, Atsushi Koizumi, Sara Kim, Patricia Bohrer, Ricardo Escutia, Soojeong Jo, Jiyoung Kim, Mingkyu Kim, Yixin Liu, Doreen Lam, Alvaro Mayoral, Selin Semaan, Paula Zapolski Structural/Mechanical Engineering: ARUP NY / Mahadev Raman, Brian Markham, Rajesh Shah Design year: 2008 Construction year: 2009-2010 Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China Constructed Area: 1,000 sqm aprox
The Ordos 100 projects are challenged to go beyond the individuality of the villa in itself and achieve, in the togetherness of all 100 villas, an urban totality with a coherent sense of whole. The project suggests turning the matrix of streets and alleys containing the 100 villas into a recognizable public space with clearly defined spatial and material qualities. We envision a hypothetic scenario in which all future vegetation is limited to the interior of private gardens within the individual lot of each villa, while the urban space is, devoid of any greenery, minimally appointed with a hardscape of stone paving and appropriate urban lighting. This would not only reduce costs of maintenance for the public space between villas but also define the experience of moving from public to private as a ritual progression between two dramatically different environments that are not defined by the uncritical adoption of existing design clichés, but rather defined by conditions suggested by design imagination and the climatic conditions encountered in its desert site.
