For more than 200 years, the
Yellow River has been the cradle of Dawan Village, and become the witness of
its developing cultural context. It was not only a
frontier city in history, but also a passage way that connects the culture and
economy in Serindia area, a precious landscape that combines the Yellow River
and the desert.
The project is located at
the bank of the River. We do not want an ambitious landmark, instead, we want
to create buildings that involves into the nature and become invisible,
balancing architecture and nature with humbleness and veneration. There are 15
rooms in the hotel, each room was injected with different characteristics and
has a framed view to the river or to the fruit-bearing forest. By creating
different room types, DAS Lab tries to experiment on different models, scales
and materials to re-evaluate the relationship between human and nature.
Inheriting from local
houses, the hotel is designed with flat houses, terraces, courtyards and reed-topped
eaves galleries to encourage more outdoor activities.
We used a special treatment
of cement mortar on the exterior walls to restore the texture of rammed earth
wall from local buildings, so the architecture will look beautifully “old”
after being exposed to winds and rains after a while.
The Dawan Village, located
in the east longitude 105.19, in the north latitude of 37.50, the lowest
temperature in winter reaches minus 20°. Therefore, except the large-scale
floor-to-ceiling windows to the landscape, the other facades have limited
openings. By doing this, we managed to re-examine the relationship between windows,
lights, space and human, and to further lead to exploring the scenarized expression
of our consciousness on spaces.
Light is a key element in
the interior. Light is the shadow, when all decorations and colors are visually
hidden in the heaviness of space, you will only see the light and the shadow changing
with time, playing a symphony on the walls and floors and conveying the
spirituality of the space, which stimulates strong emotional resonance.
We believes that a parent-child
room should be both satisfying the freedom for children to play and the
functionality for the whole family. Therefore
we designed a special space for the children in the mezzanine where the adult
may feel it too small for themselves but the children can have great fun inside.
