Renovation

“A Hamlet within the urban village” is TAO’s first urban renewal project in Nantou Ancient Town, Shenzhen. This is an urban cluster that originally consisted of multiple buildings with different property rights of the land. Part of it was preserved and partly demolished and renovated to form a new composite urban community. It is both a building and a miniature urban village. An open-ended concrete structure integrates all the old and new elements of the site, making it a stage for the lively and ever-changing life here.

The project starts with the need to connect two adjacent houses. These are two urban properties located in one of the expansion areas of the city of Terrassa, dating from the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The plots have a practically rectangular geometry, except for the inclined back lintel of the plot, and they are southeast-facing along the long side. 

Urban Cabinets is a series of housing rehabilitation projects that explore design strategies around the idea of architecture-furniture. In each one of them, a family of furniture-that-turns-into-spaces configures domesticities halfway between these two scales. The furniture grows, becomes XXL, and is thought architecturally. It values the handmade and custom-made material, crafted in small companies, and in its final execution on site, different construction trades from both areas will enter into dialogue. 

Three concrete façades of three houses are set around a courtyard. Each façade displays a different arrangement of the same constructive principle: a wall of exposed concrete rises from the ground, then, at a certain moment, a metal grid emerges from the concrete to contain a variety of local stones stacked on top of each other, until finally, the grid contains nothing but air.

Site. This project is located on the first floor of the main building of Mix Island Sicily Village in Beijing, the original building condition is a large space with open space and a mezzanine, In terms of space design, we draw inspiration from the nature and adopt the concept of “taking shape in nature” to divide multiple dining areas, form a small rainforest tribe, and establish a subtropical style bar that echoes the holiday wind of Sicily Village.

Island Territory – Inhabiting the Marsh.  Le Perrier is a small village in the Vendée marshes, nestled halfway between Challans, a charming coastal town, and Saint-Jean-de-Monts, the nearest bustling seaside resort. Here, we find ourselves in the heart of the “Marais de Soullans”, so beloved by Charles Milcendeau, the Vendéen painter and student of Gustave Moreau, who masterfully captured the unique horizontal expanse and luminosity of these landscapes.