Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has arranged translucent plastic blocks in a brick-like formation to generate new walls for a Beijing tea home overlooking the Forbidden City .
Kengo Kuma and Associates used polyethylene plastic batons to produce an elaborate grid across the ceiling and walls of every area of the personal member’s club, which is simply named Beijing Tea Property.
The white latticework is interlaced with translucent blue polycarbonate panels – offering an alternative to the decorative wood panelling and paper screens that are typical within tea homes all over Asia.
Connected story: Matted electrical cables cover the surfaces of a Tokyo bar by Kengo Kuma
These new walls allow light to filter gently into the developing from all sides. They also rise above the tea house’s conventional tiled roof to enclose a terrace overlooking the Forbidden City – Beijing’s former imperial palace, and one particular of the city’s biggest tourist points of interest.
There are quite a few tea houses dotted around the outer walls of the UNESCO-listed palace, which was constructed in the early 15th century and occupied by imperial courts until finally the early 1900s, when it was converted into a museum.
Chinese studio Cutscape Architecture just lately finished one to the north-east corner of the complex, inside a pair of converted brick warehouses, although Kengo Kuma’s stands at the east gate.
The staggered arrangement of the new walls is reminiscent of the city’s standard brick architecture – which the company also referenced for a Beijing clothing boutique enclosed with walls of latticed aluminium.
“The primary structure for the city of Beijing is masonry bricks,” explained Kengo Kuma and Associates. “Blocks created of polyethylene are in this sense a contemporary edition of masonry.”
“It proves substantial efficiency in insulation and passes by means of light to create a gentle room of Zen, just as the paper utilised for Siheyuan [courtyard residences] did in the previous,” they extra.
The white plastic framework was made by means of rotational moulding, a method the place liquid plastic is inserted into a mould and slowly rotated to make a hollow form.
Slotted with each other in various formations, the blocks develop show nooks in the interior walls, and also hang down from the ceiling of every space.
“Four kinds of blocks have been created by rotational moulding to be joined and stuck up, as the structure of the extended component,” explained the architects.
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Dark timber floors and furniture can be identified on the ground level of the constructing, while the two upper floors feature tea rooms decorated with patterned rugs and floor cushions.
Kuma has had a busy yr. Other not too long ago finished projects by his company consist of a bar lined with tufts of electrical cabling to give it a hairy physical appearance, a local community centre with a hilly floor and a university developing covered with hundreds of wooden strips.
Photography by Koji Fujii/Nacasa & Partners Inc.
Ground floor plan 
1st floor plan 
2nd floor strategy 
Roof plan 
North elevation Dezeen
