Anjuzhen is one of China´s few ancient cities, a small village remaining almost intact and unaltered by the pressure of progress that razed almost all historic quarters over the last decades throughout China. Located 70km northwest of Chongqing, it is today comparable to a museum town, lacking habitants but animated by tourists that visit the temples, theatres and manors and seize the old streets for a day-trip and vanish at night.
In spring 2017 we were invited to visit the site and to develop ideas for a series of infrastructure facilities in the immediate outskirts of the historic centre, mostly built in the 70ies and esteemed as useless and disruptive to the image the local authorities seek for. The client, a subsidiary of the state-owned CRCC (China Railway Construction Company), is also desirous of focussing the projects on creating incentives for the tourists to prolong their visit and stay overnight. ShuǐTǎ Tower is one of the three projects we were commissioned to rethink and redesign.
The tower structure is a concrete cylinder with a diameter of 8,50m serving in the past as a water deposit to Anjuzhen. The structure sits on the rocky riverbank, the basement lacks any opening. An old wooden bridge connects the tower´s top floor to a terrace on the high bank.
After discarding several options for conversions (like the observation tower), the client defines it´s use as a scholarship guesthouse for invited poets and commissions us the construction design for a two-storey suite with a roof top terrace. The new guesthouse will function as an annex to a nearby existing building that will be turned into a five star hotel in the future. Both buildings will be connected via the existing bridge.
Our design cuts the old structure above the access bridge level and maintains the concrete base. Rising at that point, an external 3-storey-high steel structure composed of piled layers of slim tubes disposed in V-shape hold an inner glass volume. All convex glass surfaces are fixed and hold no openings. The circular glass surface is interrupted at determined areas by concave shaped opaque timber walls, creating small terraces. The concave timber walls hold all doors that give access to the building or the terraces and ventilate the inner space. An external net of vertical stainless steel cables is displayed to support climbing plants.
In between these layers, a pattern of automated pneumatic cushions is placed to the southwest. These are inflated to create privacy and protect from the views from the nearby buildings and to control the temperature shading the façade.
