The current project is a café located at West Lake Tiandi in HangZhou, surrounded with plenty of greenery in the landscape. Xihutiandi is a commercial district planned for restaurants and cafés. Unique to Xihutiandi is the fact that it is surrounded by one of the world heritage sites, West Lake and its landscape. Due to its special location, we payed special attention to focus on the continuity and relationship between the Chinese gardens and the West Lake landscape when thinking about design.

With the limitation of the surrounding landscape the architecture was subject to in mind. The architecture were all built with glass, iron, or stone to conceal the architecture while protecting the beautiful landscape. So what we do is to design the interior and make it a warm space to better fit the theme of a coffee shop.

Although the space is surrounded by plenty of vegetation, the existing building was a Chinese style cloister atrium with a courtyard. We focused on the boundary between the existing interior ceiling and the glass ceiling. This boundary line where the bright space and the dim space meet allow for both bright and dark areas to coexist in one space and create shadows.
We kept all the double beam structure under the glass. In this warm space, we preserved and followed the form of the existing structure while adding additional wooden beams to create interesting weave patterns. The wood beam passing through the original structure, the materiality of wood creates a warm and cozy atmosphere of a coffee shop.

If we were to pick a main focus of Xihutiandi, it would be the beautiful landscape of West Lake, The prominent floating wood structure that can be seen through the glass windows, perfectly connecting the interior and exterior space with surrounding environment.