Silver Interior · 2023

Utopia Residential House

by Fei Zhao

Silver A' Design Award 2023 in Interior
CLIENT: 323 Studio
Estimated Number of Design Views: 17,862
Verification code 0443ACA078 · Verify this award

Visit Site View at A' Design Award Press Release

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About Utopia Residential House

The radiant natural light is the source of the form of this space. An organic, inclusive space was the feeling designers wanted to create, so they also compared a lot of organic space practices, including the positioning of the construction drawings. The original basement space occupied half of the whole area, but the existing lighting in the basement only allowed the owner to make some useless space out of it. In order to improve the utilization rate of the whole underground space and increase the lighting, the designer wants to create a brand-new construction around the light indoors.

About the Silver A' Design Award

Utopia Residential House is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Utopia Residential House is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Utopia Residential House is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.

Press Kit

Unique Properties: As a narrow north-south facing townhouse, the original building has 4 floors, 2 above ground and 2 below (the basement has a height of 5.5m and can be divided into 2 floors with only a small patio to provide light). Facing south as the main direction of light, it relies on a stairwell to connect the various floors and comes with a lift. After observing the site and realizing that no well landscape was around the site, we decided to make an Inward facing construction within it.
Dimensions & Packaging: Indoor area 420 ㎡
Tags: Organic, light and shadow, lighthearted, sculptural, textural contrasts
Production Technology: The curved wall and the laminated cast-in-place revolving staircase were a very big challenge for this project in terms of landing. First of all, the curved wall is an irregular shape, and the boundary of each floor has different positioning dimensions. In order to keep the errors to a minimum, the builder used ropes to locate the 2 layers connected to the basement at multiple points while positioning according to the drawings, just to ensure the coherence of the curved walls.
For the construction drawings, we refer to the positioning method of Toyo Ito’s construction drawings, the contour grid positioning method.
Design Challenge: Guiding the constructor to land our project, and connecting with the structure and electromechanical team, both are hard nuts for us to crack. There are many first attempts for us, also for our constructor.
Research: We focus on the impact of light on the residential environment, taking sunlight as a case study, by observation of the duration and direction of sunlight at the winter and summer solstices.
Inspiration: The radiant natural light is the source of the form of this space. An organic, inclusive space was the feeling we wanted to create, so we also compared a lot of organic space practices, including the positioning of the construction drawings.
Project Duration: The project started on October 17th 2020 and finished on August 1st 2021 in Zhengzhou, China.
Operation Flow: In terms of functional distribution, we clearly divide the functional areas of each floor, which are both independent and well-connected.
The 1st floor and the 2nd floor underground are the main floors for daily access, serving as public spaces, while the relatively independent 2nd floor serves as residential spaces. Owners also have the need for daily gatherings, so we try to make each functional area larger.The staircase has been redesigned to provide a more comfortable connection of traffic flow between the functional areas on each level.
Patents: Design copyright: 323studio
Image Credits: Photographic institutions：WMstudio