Chinese firm Wutopia Lab has recently designed a guest house for Fortune Art Homestay in Xiyaotou Village, China, taking inspiration from the famous painting Le Calcul Mental by French artist Magritte. In this countryside guesthouse, the architect identified himself as a stranger in the village and expressed a simple and direct gesture of how to understand or change the local landscape or activate local life as a stranger.
Everything in this area was surrounded by continuous walls so the design is just a reinforcement of this traditional type in this site. The walls were raised to 7 meters to create an image of complete independence. Its purpose is to create a place that helps strangers look inside as well as create a warm living experience in winter and a cool living experience in summer with minimal use of electricity in terms of warmth and shade.
Wutopia Lab has designed each room as a separate building with no corridor connection. Walking out of the room is the outdoor. It’s a typical type in china’s courtyard. From this perspective, the architect redesigned the traditional building type and reassembling it. The core of this courtyard is the central courtyard. Unfortunately, the fire pit in the center of the courtyard is eliminated because of the building code in China.
The interior was designed to resemble a sanctuary of self-exile. All kinds of small arrangements to please people were eliminated, including the clock. “This is a place to re-experience time, as the occupant can only estimate the approximate time by the change of natural light,” explains the studio. “To be precise, the experience of time takes you back to the old days, the blurred feeling of being free from the precise measurement of clocks. Perhaps this is the only way that the sky can replace the landscape and the phone, so that light can be dominant elements in space. To be precise, the experience of time takes you back to the old days, the blurred feeling of being free from the precise measurement of clocks.”
