DaShiLar Creepers

The Dashilar is a remnant of Beijing’s old city, sitting adjacent to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City - physically close, yet materially distant from the centre of power. Here the turmoil of China’s recent history is marked into its fabric, the lived history of the now mostly elderly residents.

Through collectivization, reform and opening up the boundary between public and private has become blurred, resulting in many contradictions between the residents and government. To survive the residents used abandoned or cheap materials to build extra space and adapt the Siheyuan house type. However, for safety reasons and the ‘protection’ the traditional Hutong style, the Beijing Municipal Government has completely banned all forms of additional structure, removing these historical marks from after 1949, to return the Dashilar, externally to what it was at the end of the Qing Dynasty. If these marks are erased, the lived culture and experience of Beijing’s old city life atmosphere will disappear forever.

Dashilar Creepers co-opts the bottom-up organic building that constitutes the unique Hutong architectural form. Infrastructure to facilitate the continued existence of the elderly is inserted into the gaps, extending and adapting the nature of the Dashilar, further blurring the boundary between private and public space to bring new vitality to the Dashilar area, balancing the contradictions between government policy and the lived experiences of the residents.