Tea House, J-Office

Built on an extremely constricted site with a mature tree, and constructed from the salvaged parts of the original warehouse’s collapsed roof, the Tea House sits in the backyard of Archi-Union’s J-office.  The design reacts to the site’s environment, and tries to embody harmony.  The building is divided into three parts: public area, private area, and transitional space.  The public space is built facing the pool, with an enclosed tea house at ground level, and a library with a balcony above it.  The private lounge, reading room, and service room are arranged near the rear of the building.  The transitional space was designed around a twisted nonlinear hexahedron staircase that provides an inner courtyard, and brings a new experience to otherwise ordinary functional space.

The irregular, twisting shape is supposed to be impossible to understand through traditional building plans.  The constraints of low-tech, manual labor required Archi-Union to invent solutions during construction.  Eventually a unique timber framework was produced.  After the concrete was finished, the timbers were removed, and their impressions can still been seen on the surface of the concrete.