Author: pluto

TDX Ice Factory

A former ice factory of about 4,000 m² has been turned into a showroom, office and event compound for a furniture brand. Completed in 2024, the project keeps the original concrete structure and adds as little new construction as it can.

The approach begins in a narrow alley, typical of the surrounding city fabric, and opens into a single compound for work, cultural events and craft. A dark charcoal finish ties the buildings together while keeping their industrial character. The plan borrows from the traditional courtyard house, balancing enclosed rooms with open areas, and the event space at its centre draws air through the site and serves as a flexible venue for gatherings.

Inside, the emphasis is on honest structure and real materials. Timber salvaged from the brand’s previous factory, stored for more than fifteen years, has been reworked into beams, wall panels and light fittings. Locally sourced bamboo, burlap and natural stone join it, chosen for their texture, their durability and their place in local building culture.

The roof over the outdoor event space shows the approach most clearly. Each layer was chosen for what it means as well as for how it performs, so a single detail carries both the site’s past and its present use.

Extending the life of the existing structure keeps the environmental cost low, and nothing is there just for decoration. In a city of fast change and polished new development, the compound tells a different story: an industrial relic made useful again for work, exchange and craft.

November 1, 2026
A Collage of Outcasts

A Collage of Outcasts turns a house left empty for five years into a coffee shop and office. The neighbourhood is a well-off residential area where houses hide behind perimeter walls 2.6 metres high, the legal maximum, and some go higher still. The area also floods with the tide, so the previous owner had raised the ground floor and garden 1,100 mm above the pavement.

That raised base became the starting point. Lifted above the street, the ground floor looks out over the walls toward a wider view of the neighbourhood, and the surrounding landscape became one of the project’s main materials. The designers named three things that kept buildings here apart from their setting: comfort, uniform style and an outdated idea of efficiency. Behind them sat a larger question about what a full and stimulating life might look like, and how design can help shape it.

The project asks how different people can live side by side, and answers through thresholds. Windows, balconies and doors sit between public and private, individual and collective, and carry contrasts such as warm and cold, seen and unseen. The ground floor is composed as a series of views that respond to the landscape, the site and the light, valued for what they suggest rather than for what can be measured.

Columns placed at the edges work as frames. Round ones read almost as abstract lines, like the edge of a picture frame, while square ones sit back in shadow and hold their own weight. The experience is broken into small parts so that each view can be taken in on its own. Walking in from the street, the scenes shift step by step, and perception reaches past the eye into the body.

The result supports many ways of using the space and invites the community to share the landscape rather than wall it off. Its value lies in what cannot be counted, and its pieces, tangible and abstract, come together as a collage of outcasts.

November 1, 2026
SAGA Vietnam Office

The design team has restored a 130-year-old colonial building in the old quarter and turned it into their own office, shared with a partner studio. Across 300 m² it holds meeting rooms, open work areas, a boardroom and exhibition space.

The approach was to do as little as possible. Very few buildings of this age survive in the city, especially outside commercial use, so the team let the existing building set the mood instead of giving it a new identity. Every intervention is non-destructive, and the historic fabric stays intact and readable.

Much of the work was uncovering what had been hidden over the years. Brick arches and parts of the original structure were exposed again, restoring a visual and physical link to the building’s past. Materials throughout are sustainable, biogenic or reused.

Open-plan areas sit beside enclosed meeting rooms, a boardroom and exhibition halls, so the office works both as a studio and as a place for exchange. Modern services are fitted quietly and kept out of the way of the old rooms.

The most distinctive space is the former balcony, once half inside and half out. It is now a planted reading and meeting room, full of daylight and greenery, a calm centre that still mediates between inside and outside as it always did.

November 1, 2026
Half Solid House

Half Solid House sits on a 100 m² corner plot where two alleys meet. The two open edges promised daylight and cross-ventilation, but they also faced strong afternoon sun from the west and left the family’s life in full view of the street.

The family wanted to live close to the outdoors and to the neighbourhood. The design gives about half of the house to flexible, semi-open shared areas and keeps the rest as enclosed rooms for specific uses: sleeping, circulation, laundry, storage and bathrooms.

A second skin of white vertical louvers wraps the semi-open parts. It cuts the western sun and limits direct views from the alleys, a filtered edge in place of a solid wall, so the family can keep living in the open air. Inside, sliding doors let them adjust how private the shared spaces are, and the house moves gradually from communal to private.

Planting grew in importance as the design developed, once the owners said how much they enjoyed growing things. There are planting beds at ground level, and on the upper floors metal platforms between the louvers and the windows hold potted plants. As the greenery grows it softens the white screen, adds shade and filters views further, so the facade keeps changing with the family’s care.

The house looks for a middle ground in tropical city housing. Openness remains a principle, but privacy, pollution, heat and noise make it harder to live with the windows open. Here layered edges keep the air moving and the neighbourhood close while still protecting family life.

November 1, 2026
Chashitsu & Pottery Pavilion

The Chashitsu & Pottery Pavilion is a 70 m² installation made to show old ceramics and to give the Japanese tea ceremony a place to be practised. Its form comes from the longhouse of the Êđê people, a communal building centred on the k’pan, a long bench tied to ritual, ceremony and teaching.

That bench becomes the spine of the pavilion: a linear corridor that is also where visitors rest and drink tea. The designers treated the space less as an exhibition room than as a sequence in which architecture, craft and ritual meet. The footprint is small, but the long route slows people down and lets the pavilion work as both gallery and gathering place.

The palette is held back so the objects can speak. Black-finished engineered wood panels form a muted backdrop, and light enters through narrow slits, recalling the inside of a ceramic kiln in one of the country’s oldest pottery villages. Images showing clay turning into ceramic hang from the ceiling, adding a layer of craft knowledge to the walk.

Jars and vats are put to new use as tables, seats and storage for the tea ceremony. Fired-earth vessels made for daily life here find a second role in another culture’s ritual, and the two traditions meet through shared material.

The pavilion was conceived as a response to the decline of the craft villages, which face growing pressure from industrial production and changing ways of life. It asks visitors to look again at the handmade object and at the history it carries.

November 1, 2026
Haikou Gaoxingli Insun Cinema

For this cinema, the designers looked to its island setting without reaching for a literal marine palette. Instead of blue for the sea, they chose brick, linking it back to sand and using its modularity to build an interior of waves, folds and layered surfaces.

The public areas are shaped by precisely placed bricks that rise, curl and overlap like breaking waves. From different angles the courses stay legible as separate strata, and lighting is tucked into recesses so the brickwork remains dominant.

Daylight is unusual here. Cinemas usually shut it out, but this lobby lets sunlight in, changing the look of the rough brick through the day. The material stays tactile, while topaz tones, curved furniture and controlled artificial light soften the mood.

The wave carries into counters, booths and low walls. Curves sweep in different directions and turn circulation into one continuous sequence rather than a set of rooms. Even forms at floor level are shaped and lit to stay visible in low light, so the same language helps with wayfinding and safety.

Beyond the lobby the palette shifts to softer materials and stronger colour. Exposed services run above blocks of velvety upholstery, ring lights wrap the columns, and seating brings in copper and pastel tones. In the auditoriums, movement is carried by colour instead of masonry: in one, dimensional fabric panels overlap across the walls in sweeping bands, and in another, coloured panels meet references to rough brick and vertical lines of light.

In 2024 the project was recognised by a long list of international programmes, among them Red Dot, iF Design, IIDA, the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards and the Kukan Design Award.

November 1, 2026
Chenhu Migratory Bird Observation Tower

The tower stands on a natural promontory within a protected wetland. It rises 19.8 metres above a lake, a river and a wide marsh that shelters more than 100,000 migratory birds each winter.

The architects treated the climb itself as the main landscape experience, rather than a route to a viewpoint. The design slows people down, and the changing heights, pauses and turns gradually shift how they relate to the wetland.

Two independent staircases coil in opposite directions to form a double helix, one for going up and one for coming down. Twenty-four staggered platforms break the climb. Close views into the tree canopy give way to long views over the marsh, so the full panorama arrives in framed pieces. The team describes three stages, ascending, turning and overlooking, and the view from the top becomes the end of a journey rather than a separate destination.

Circulation also sets the structure. There is no central core. The stairs work together with counter-rotating steel braces, whose opposing forces resist twisting and leave a three-metre void open through the middle of the tower. Parametric modelling reduced the geometry to 24 standard modules, which were prefabricated off site and assembled in place to keep work in the sensitive wetland to a minimum.

A matte silver metal skin wraps the structure and changes with the weather: muted in mist, reflecting blue on clear days, warmer at sunset. The tower does not try to disappear. It uses light and material to register the changing atmosphere, and by folding path, structure and lookout into one system it works as both an object and a route.

November 1, 2026
Café · Fulfillment

Three curtains decide how much of the museum enters this small café. Raised, they open a compact place to sit and drink coffee within the larger public interior. Lowered, they draw a boundary around it, while light and the outlines of people still show through. The change is small, but it gives the same space two different relationships with what surrounds it.

Café · Fulfillment is the fourth of seven built environments in the architect’s concept exhibition at an art museum, opened in early 2026, which explores his relationship with the city. Visitors meet the architecture by entering it, using it and sharing it with others.

For the architect, the café holds a particular place in everyday city life. It sits between public and private, street and interior. Someone can stop alone, two people can start a conversation, and strangers can share a room for a while without becoming a group. Coffee gives all of them a reason to be there. He compares the café to a needle, a small intervention that can reach a precise point in the city.

Aluminium profiles form a light, modular structure. During assembly, the exposed frame began to read as a space of its own, so the team decided to leave it visible. The architect calls it an exoskeleton: its repeated members and joints make the construction legible and outline the enclosure without the weight of a permanent room.

The three curtained sides turn enclosure into something that can be adjusted. With the curtains up, the counter and seating connect to the museum around them. As they come down, those connections are filtered. Light passes through, figures register beyond the edge, and the café keeps a sense of nearby activity while offering a quieter place to stop.

The installation brings the architect’s case for light-touch urban renewal down to the scale of a daily ritual. A seat and a cup of coffee give people a reason to linger, and the frame and curtains give that moment a place, a room whose edges change with the wish for company or quiet.

November 1, 2026
Growing House

In a tea-growing village, a family’s houses, storage buildings and garden have been drawn together into a whole that keeps changing. Growing House opens rooftops that had long been closed off, using translucent timber structures and a bridge to make new shared spaces within the village fabric.

The project began with a storage building the client wanted to turn into a tea room for tasting and retail. Two small houses stood on either side of a cluttered, half-outdoor gap. Instead of treating the gap as leftover space, the architects set a translucent timber truss above it and carried a bridge across the roof, joining the two rooftops into one continuous landscape.

The bridge makes the roofs usable and brings visitors close to two existing camphor trees. A young tree planted beneath the canopy gives the old storage gap the feel of both a room and a courtyard. Partitions between the three buildings were taken out, so the interiors now run together and can be divided or opened up as needed. The tea room has outgrown its first brief. It hosts meals, team gatherings and children’s parties, and its roof has become a landmark that draws people to a site set back from the main road.

The main house occupies two neighbouring farmhouses from the late twentieth century. One was renovated, and beside it a new volume opens a previously sealed attic and adds a two-storey structure above, kept within the height of the neighbouring houses. A flat-roofed viewing room forms the lower level. Above it, a translucent timber frame shelters a half-outdoor garden and a small blue room. The rooftop can serve as a family suite or as shared space, carrying daily life up into the air without dominating the village skyline.

Around the renovated farmhouse, a new volume wraps the old dwelling. Its perforated facades turn three times around it, forming a continuous outer layer. A two-storey semi-outdoor zone planned between old and new was brought inside during talks with the client, adding usable floor area. The ground floor holds a café and restaurant, the second floor gatherings and meetings, and the upper floors living quarters and guest rooms. Movable partitions let rooms work together or apart, and a looping ramp links the second floor to the garden so visitors can come and go when the levels run separately.

The house took shape over two phases of construction, and the design kept responding to new requests. An outward-facing bar produced a small timber volume on the facade, and a wish for outdoor dining added another canopy above the tea room. Apart from half of the third floor, kept as the owners’ home, the spaces are used freely for meals, meetings, salons and talks. A path of about 100 metres and a third timber canopy at the roadside are still to come. For the architects, the point is that a home can grow through use rather than arrive finished.

November 1, 2026
Hong Tien Garden Villa

Hong Tien Garden Villa replaces a former family workshop with a home for three generations. The site was once a place of work and hard years. It is now given over to family life, and the house is shaped around the memories and daily habits the family brought with them.

The house sits in a close-knit rural community where the neighbouring homes belong to the same extended family. Rather than break with the way they live, the design team reworked familiar domestic patterns in a contemporary language.

Everything turns on an open courtyard. It links the main living spaces and stays loose enough for daily routines as well as larger gatherings. Verandas, deep roof overhangs and timber screens make the passage from inside to outside gradual, keeping the house open while protecting the privacy that family life here depends on. The kitchen sits in a separate outbuilding, as it did in older rural homes.

The courtyard was first planned as extra space for planting. Use showed what else it could be: a place for children to play, for relatives to gather and for family celebrations. At the Lunar New Year it fills with ornamental plants and the long cooking of sticky rice cakes, and it has become the social centre of the house.

Concrete gives the building a restrained, contemporary base, and screens of lim, a dense hardwood long used in traditional timber houses, add warmth. The owner chose it partly for that history and partly for childhood memories of it, so the material ties a personal story to a wider building tradition.

The project is less about turning an industrial site into a garden house than about keeping relationships going across generations. Much of its character lies outside the walls, in the courtyard, the shaded verandas and the garden, where family and neighbours carry on much as before.

November 1, 2026
Jinyun Quarries

The cuts left by stone extraction determine where people can sit and move through Jinyun Quarries. In Zhejiang, China, DnA_Design and Architecture adapted three disused quarries for public use in 2022, retaining their uneven ledges and openings to the sky. Quarry 8 uses the terraces left by excavation as reading platforms. Stone stairs climb between them, with desks and bookshelves fitted along the edges. Steel handrails and pressed bamboo panels form a much smaller enclosure within the tall rock walls, bringing places to read into spaces originally shaped by the removal of stone.

Quarry 9 opens from a narrow entrance into a theatre whose walls taper towards a slit of daylight. Vertical cuts at the lower level record machine excavation, while the sloping surfaces above were worked by hand. Acoustic testing informed the flooring and sound-absorbing measures; weathering steel panels line the side railings. The space accommodates Wuju opera as well as other performances and gatherings. Rain enters through the opening overhead and collects in a shallow depression, reflecting the rock walls and the lighting along the floor.

At Quarry 10, a ramp reaches a viewing terrace above the quarry floor. Curved spectator steps descend towards the area where local stonemasons demonstrate their tools and cutting techniques. The terrace is finished in local stone, with tool storage tucked beneath it. Here, the quarrying process remains visible through the workers’ demonstrations as well as in the marks on the surrounding walls. Across the three sites, stabilisation and safety work preceded the new public uses; concrete was reserved for necessary reinforcement.

The accompanying photographs also document the 2022 exhibition at Aedes in Berlin. Enlarged quarry photographs lined a curved passage, while illuminated scale replicas showed how the new installations fitted within the excavated spaces. A larger replica of the stairs and terraces in Quarry 8 allowed visitors to examine the connections at closer range.

October 29, 2026
Tofu Factory

A covered stair follows the making of tofu up a riverside slope in Caizhai Village, China. Visitors pass the workshops in the order of production, watching through glazed walls before reaching a tasting hall at the upper end. DnA_Design and Architecture arranged Tofu Factory around this route, allowing a working food facility to remain visible without turning its production rooms into a public thoroughfare.

Completed in 2018, the factory brings together family workshops whose premises could not meet the food certification requirements for supermarket sales. A village cooperative operates the facility, with participating households as shareholders. Preparation and grinding occupy the beginning of the sequence; boiling, frying and drying follow as the building steps uphill. The changes in level divide the work into separate rooms while the covered passage connects them. At the top, the tasting hall faces a south-facing plaza and the older village across the river.

The assembled timber frame repeats through the workshops and along the visitor route. Posts and roof beams remain exposed, with glass between the workrooms and the passage so that the structure does not interrupt views of the activity inside. Low pitched roofs step with the ground instead of enclosing the whole operation beneath one large roof. At the river edge, stone retaining walls support the terraces. The timber bays continue into the tasting area, where tables sit beneath the same visible roof structure as the production spaces.

October 29, 2026

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