Xuanxi North, Beijing, China
Team Members: Pouya Goshayeshi, Bing Zhao, Yueming Zhao, Steven Chaffer, Seregin Dmitry
X-craft project is meant to revitalize Hutong culture by considering todays’ needs and preserving culture and architectural heritage. After analyzing the circulation, typology and the site context, a series of intertwine programs that complement each other were proposed for this project where public programs such as retail and restaurant is located along the street, private program at the center of the blocks, and series of activity center including cultural, art, and gallery in main intersection and at specific locations.
This project is challenging to preserve Hutong street mass and create transparency at the same time to work with required program by introducing a facade that is made of bricks that could rotate and create openings that is only visible to user from specific location and perspective angle. The sidewalks are using natural pattern that is made of identical roof shingle and grass in-between where it sustain the Hutong environment and reduce the urban heat island effect. The roof are renovated to traditional Hutong roof with breaks in the mass where it connects the people to Hutong history.
In this drawing we area looking at the section of the wall facing the street. The exterior facade is bricks (traditional bricks), behind it there is a curtain wall glazing seating on a curb, the structure is the balloon frame, and the side walk is made of hutong roof singles where we have grass in between. 
One of the challenges that we face was how to keep the Hutong street massing typology but at the same time opening some of the street facade to bring traffic to public buildings. What we mean by massing typology, is the feeling when you walk through the narrow Hutong, and there is mystery that surround you, the linearity. To keep this feeling, we keep the mass around the street, but as you get near the building because of the angle of the bricks you could look inside the Hutong and see the program and people and create connection. 
Also we introduce transparency fading effect that opens up part of the facade and at the same time close some other part to create more dynamic feeling. 
To simplify constructibility of the facade, we use all identical brick, in other words all the material is made of module same size brick. This transparency is the effect of rotating this bricks along the center axis. This way we could keep the construction on budget and also satisfy the architectural concept. 
We thought about using a pattern that has natural form, and use traditional material in a modern way. We use roof shingle and we decided to put grass between them. 
The grass would give moisture to the air during the day, and create pleasant breath where people would like to gather and enjoy their time walking over these sidewalks and at the same time reduce the carbon footprint of transportation by providing more pedestrian friendly pathways. 
Our team also think about the constructibility of sidewalks’ organic form, where we thought that all the roof shingle could be the same, and this organic form is the result of variation of angles between the panels 
We believe people would make connection to Hutong history through traditional roof element. We want to renovate this roof and make it similar to Hutong traditional roof as much as possible. We think one of the main element that connect this roof to traditional roof is massing where you read the roof as series of roofs connected to each other. we divide the massing by stepping the roof in elevation or create a gap or edge condition at some places. 
