Ordos Villa
WORKac’s contribution to Ai Weiwei’s “Ordos 100” project makes the required 8-bedroom house into an experiment in living both collectively and individually, inviting alternative scenarios of occupation. Responding to the context of 99 other architects’ visionary houses in a new city in the Inner Mongolian desert, the house faces inward towards a complex interior world.
The lower floor is conceived as a multilayered “onion”: a series of perimeters with spaces and connections in between, centered on a massive hall for communal gatherings. The upper floor is a “hutong”: a dense collection of rooms and courtyards, based on a seven by seven grid. Around the periphery, four private living quadrants are accessed via independent stairways, inscribed in the narrow spaces between two of the onion’s layers. The configuration allows for a large family with independence for its members, a guest house, or four families that decide to live together.
