Guan Xia Beijing Flagship Store

The Guanxia Beijing Flagship Store is located at No. 23 Guozijian Street, in a three-courtyard siheyuan built in the mid-Qing dynasty. It is the second century-old residence Guanxia has restored in China, following the earlier Hunan Road No. 111 project, and the restoration took one year. Faced with a 280-year-old building, the design begins by weighing the balance between preservation and reuse. Where the siheyuan before renovation was a complete, closed spatial system based on its old functions, introducing a new program requires first dismantling and clearing the compound into a loose sequence of subspaces. Borrowing Derrida's reading of deconstruction, the team argues that reading the original text deconstructively breaks its boundaries and opens it infinitely to itself and to other texts, so that what was old is continually supplemented and substituted. Deconstruction is understood not as negation of space but as active construction that happens at the same time as dissolution. The project therefore pursues two lines of exploration: cognition and perception. First, systematizing knowledge of the siheyuan as a building type establishes a rational understanding that allows effective dismantling; at the same time, the team records how the materials, colors, plants, temperature and sounds of the site affect subjective experience. The lead architects are Zheng Yu and Zhan Di, with project management by Shen Qianshi, lighting by Libenshe and Zhang Xu, and structural engineering by Tao Xinwei and Wang Haoyu, working for client Guanxia.