White facade nestles in Guangzhou’s rugged cityscape

The Village project, completed by the Chinese studio Team_Bldg in Guangzhou, reasons on different scales, from interior design to urban landscape. The building on which the architects worked is located in the Yuexiu district, an urban village that is one of the most densely populated areas of the city. Its urban fabric is full of life, plenty of small shops, highly trafficked and well connected to the rest of the city. Team_Bldg has transformed the facade of a 1950s construction to work on two distinct levels: improving the quality of the interior spaces and having an aesthetic impact on the rest of the neighborhood.

The element that characterizes the new intervention is the aluminium skin, wavy and semi-transparent, that wraps the entire reinforced concrete structure, on which no substantial changes have been made. The new external cladding reduces the weight of the construction and creates a sharp contrast between the new graft and the decadent architecture of the surroundings. However, an important part of the renovation concerns the inner core of the building, which was in an advanced state of decay. With the new project, the common areas are cleaned up and tidied up, making them comfortable and habitable again.

“The renovation of old buildings has always been a project type that we are particularly interested in - it is often complicated on both the physical and the spiritual levels, with limits in structure, specifications and costs and other aspects; but at the same time, it is also particularly real and vivid, with a unique personality and contradictions, waiting for architects to understand and solve,” say the architects of Team_Bldg.