Refurbishment of a rural building and new service pavilions
Longguan, China

The competition task was about a meditation and purification resort in a small village on Ningbo hillside, among shrines and monasteries. The accommodation was to be settled in a refurbished old rural building, while two adjacent lots were intended to house additional facilities. Our proposal was funded on a strong empathy towards the context. The old building has been left unaltered from outside and rearranged in the interior as a battery of frugal rooms coated with qualitative natural materials. Paths outside each room drive the guests through the woods towards inspiring meditation places. The empty lots instead have been colonised by two star planned pavilions: a tea house with a specific corner for each of the six traditional fragrancies of the tea ceremony, and a thermal bath, whose satin glazed façade filters the outside landscape into a peaceful blurry vision. These pure geometric prisms, landed in the nature as stranger objects, should then affect the surrounding cultivation pattern and landscaping system as two counterpointing mandalas.S