At a village edge in Quzhou, China, Longyou Tourist Center designed by atelier tao+c reframes tourism as quiet coexistence, weaving light structures into an old house and courtyard to mediate between river, road, locals, and visitors.
The project settles into a late Qing dynasty household at the edge of the Qu River, where paths, yards, and negotiations have historically shaped space. The intervention resists spectacle, instead amplifying the social intelligence embedded in the village’s irregular geometry.
The site is already dense with temporal layers: an old timber house, a courtyard anchored by a tree, and a kitchen annex appended in the 1990s. Rather than erasing these accretions, the architects introduce a light-footprint shed that supports the rhythms of the Hushiguang Art Eco Site. It becomes a hinge between locals and visitors, a place to rest, chat, and linger, where tourism is folded into daily village life rather than imposed upon it.
A single-column passage traces the oblique perimeter of the courtyard, carving out a new rectangular void set at a slight angle to the main house. This maneuver clarifies boundaries without hardening them. Acting as an intermediate threshold, the passage filters traffic noise from the road while channeling river air inward, a climatic and social buffer that quietly recalibrates the site’s spatial hierarchy.
The eaves modulate in three heights, responding with precision to adjacency and use. Near the village road, the passage slices through the former kitchen annex to form a café window, then dips to mark an understated entrance. Along the neighbor’s wall, the roofline lowers further, accommodating the existing tree before easing toward the old house, maintaining a respectful distance from its façade. Architecture here is measured in centimeters and degrees, attentive to coexistence.
Inside the antique structure, removal becomes a design tool. Timber panels and floors are stripped back to reveal the original framework, while a galvanized steel system weaves through the rafters with surgical restraint. Display, seating, and lighting are unified in this reversible insertion, hovering lightly over a black epoxy floor whose gloss distinguishes new from old. The strategy is neither restoration nor renovation, but a form of use-based preservation that allows decay to remain legible.
Throughout, the material palette stays deliberately ordinary: galvanized steel tubes and corrugated stainless steel plates sourced locally and assembled on site. Their familiarity echoes village sheds and agricultural structures, aligning the project with vernacular practices rather than architectural exception. As an outsider intervention, the Longyou Tourist Center speaks softly, holding space open for future change while acknowledging the persistence of what was already there.
