Gallery
Description
A villa designed for an emerging arts district in Inner Mongolia combines literal and figurative elements of traditional Mongol and Chinese dwellings to create a lively, continually evolving environment that exudes lightness, transparency, and connectivity.
Taking the round, tentlike structure of the Mongolian yurt as a point of departure, Villa I appears to float above dunes and grass. With a northern face composed of a single door-shaped vertical rectangle and a southern face composed of two overlapping horizontal rectangles, the villa resists a solid identity as a single object, instead embodying a process of metamorphosis resembling cellular mitosis. Inside, multiple indirect looping paths offer uniquely framed views of sky, earth, and water. Guests moving through the villa soon realize that the environment is engaging them in a dance, characterized by radical shifts in scale and proportion and evoking an invigorating sensation of the gradual yet constant change intrinsic to all natural processes. Generous use of glass provides visitors with an unbroken visual connection to the site’s raw purity.