Huzhou, the House of Red Notes on the horizon

Shanchuan Township is ringed by mountains at the southernmost tip of Anji County, Huzhou, Zhejiang. The team designed a small police booth at the gate of the local central primary school, which also serves as the entry node to a nearby hot-spring scenic area. Architecture is a special living organism, and when it begins a dialogue with the horizon it gains a detached power that creates an atmosphere one can inhabit. Here the architects wanted, with one small building, to drive a high note deep into the symphony of the earth. When a person in a building looks out to distant mountains, the body should feel wrapped by the earth, the state in which human ancestors first spoke with nature. The first move was therefore a sunken pit: part of the building is buried. After repeated simulations the depth was set at one meter, so that before seeing the mountains the visitor first passes beneath the building's cover, yet not so deeply that the upper body is underground, producing a spatial experience that merges with the rolling terrain. Construction required solving technical problems: large excavation risked groundwater, and the structural engineer responded with a raft foundation. Red goes beyond red. The team sought a medium through which nature could appear, and material contrast was the opportunity. Red is emotionally charged, and a series of different reds, red ceramic tile roofing, red steel curtain-wall system, red terrazzo flooring, lets red exceed color and dialogue with the distant green hills, which in turn appear more vivid against the building. The rhythm of the roofline echoes the undulation of the distant mountains, so that the small red note on the horizon is at once an everyday civic facility and an artful remark on the landscape.