Architect: Kengo Kuma Architects
Location: Badaling, Yanqing; China
As an Environmental filter: Located in China, near the Great Wall, stands the Bamboo Wall House with its prominent bamboo façade that which allows it to blend in to its surrounding environment, creating both an aesthetic and spiritual connection to the land due to bamboo’s sacred stature in Chinese culture. Not only does this house fit in externally, but due to its façade it allows both light and wind to pass through the house creating an intimate tie between the users and the surrounding environment.
As a container for human activities: Housing six bedrooms and separate bathrooms, Bamboo Wall House is not small by any standards. With this in mind its size does not subtract from its undeniably beautiful simplicity, which allows the users an interaction with both internal and external environments like no other. This culminates, in mind, in the Tea Room, which allows its users to experience an internal space surrounded by tranquil waters and offering unrestricted views of China’s Great Wall, furthering the transparency of the entire house.
As a delightful experience: Sometimes when a house blends too well into a site it can be overlooked or forgotten. But with the Bamboo Wall House this is not the case. By blending the house so well into the site the architects have managed to not only blend perfectly with the site, so as to not compete with the Great Wall, but have also managed to delicately use the simplicity of both the bamboo façade and the tranquillity of water to enhance the surreal experience of the blended internal and external experience that is Bamboo Wall House.