Grand Prix Prof.Zhang Yue, Cheng Xiao Xi, Xu Jie, Tao Lei, Zheng Yue Yuan, Feng Jie (China) Category A Chinese Style

0 from 3 to 2+1: the background and reasoning "---clan---hierachical kin---extended family---core family---" from the history, we see a worrying procedure of the home-detaching. may our traditional family relationship disappear in more and more individualized current society? or we face the individual demands of each family members, directly, searching for a new living pattern, in which we can richly enjoy both our independences and family connections. 1 the house 2+1: child-cell sliding our scheme-i , divides a traditional living unit into two parts, fixed parents-part + slidable child-cell. the child-cell may sliding away from parents-part on family's desire, and have a possibly independent approaching in the other end.

2. the building 2+1: slidable houses integrated . a public supporting & supply corridor for children is inserted into 2 mirrored buildings. when children-cells slide & congregate along the corridor, the 2 buildings become 2+1. and then, the central building will provide for children a meaningful public space which penetrating into the distant we made between parents & children, rather than simply separate them. and sliding cell may also have more choices to attaching the parents building, or just stay in air

3. the community 2+1: slidable housing integrated a dual system will emerge in our 2+1 community, in which the adults neighbourhoods and the children grid keep their own space attribute separately. on the other hand, they are spacially interwoven tightly. and as one result, a more sociable children-world will be inspired and glorified in this community.

Comments by juries

Mendini: I agree with Prof. Zhang in every point. The jurors didn't discuss much for the Grand Prix; they all acknowledged the superiority of the winning entry. The project represents a residential type of the Chinese. Not only that, it also makes a fine exhibition of what the residents need, or what is required in their domain, along with newly-emerging social problems.
The project focused not on the self-centered and closed elements of many one-child families, but on the togetherness with people near them. One of the distinctive features of the design is that the child's room is located in such a way as to provide free movement to other rooms, even for a crawling baby and easy access to other spaces. I believe the project was well designed to help the child play and learn.
One of the reasons that attracted my attention to the work was that it made a great presentation of those problems that are commonly seen across the world in the area of architecture from an ideal perspective. I would like to congratulate the professor and his students for their work, entry No. 2, which won first prize. It was a high quality design project…. It was innovative, but frankly, it is not very much feasible. However, it is important to push creative ideas further to design for building such process-focused houses.

Kim: The prize winner was so faithful to the theme and had such clear understanding of the kernel of the theme that we decided the work for the Grand Prix without hesitation even before selecting works for Gold Prizes first. The most critical point concerning the theme, Design Beyond East & West, is to go into the heart of the reality, or to do something based on the reality, rather than to perceive East and West, or look at it from a certain perspective. The work is important in that it began with the many problems that Chinese people currently face in their modern life with regard to the one-child family. Starting from the traditional Chinese housing forms, or Hutong and Siheyuan that stemmed from the extended family system, it made a bold approach toward solving problems of the housing forms of one-child families in modern life that by and large are derived from the West. In this sense, the work befits well the big picture of our concept, "Beyond East & West."
Next, the work was proposed in Category A, or the Architecture division. Proposals in the division are evaluated not simply by a house for a unit household but by the way the unit households are connected with one another and the way the houses collectively form a village. The prize winning work made a new proposal of how one house is linked with another to form a community with neighbors by way of the traditional Chinese architectural style, especially that of Hutong in Beijing.
The prize winner should be held in high estimation as it approached via modern architecture such factors as consideration among neighbors for the child in the one-child family who is often likely to be neglected in the family, the problem of neighbors, and the relationship among neighbors in traditional Chinese housing, especially that of Hutong and Siheyuan.
The houses in the Hutong and Siheyuan, the traditional housing forms found only in Beijing, are now disappearing. Now that the screening is over, we find that the fact that a proposal based on them was made by a professor and his students from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, is itself one of the most meaningful achievements of this event. Although the work can't be put directly into implementation, the ideas proposed in the work can, if developed further, be a great architectural model for houses, leading to a new architectural tradition in Beijing.