The Tea House | Singapore

INTERIOR | ARCHITECTURE | TRAVEL

Project: The Tea House| Architects: Archi-Union Architects | Location: Shanghai, China | Photographer: Zhonghai Shen

The Tea House, located in the backyard of Archi-Union’s J-office, is constructed from the salvaged parts of the original warehouse’s collapsed roof. The site was extremely constricted with walls on three sides, and with only one side facing towards a nopen space that contains a pool. The space was further restricted by a mature tree.The design tries to embody harmony by integrating enclosure and openness, delightful space and logical construction and other complicated relations.

Concrete casting after the reinforced bar was completed by manual labor and the final physical effect was achieved. The traces of the timber formwork remained imprinted on the poured concrete after construction, with quality defects such as bubbles, adhesive failures and re-bar exposure present due to the manual construction – defects, however, that are obscured by the unique curved shape. Although there are errorsofin the formwork, planning and manual casting the combination of digital design and low-tech manual construction provided a great opportunity to study the possibilities of digital architecture.