The courtyard as a passageway
When I visited ‘hakka house’, which is a typical courtyard house in southern China, I was surprised that the residents called the courtyard ‘street’ or ‘lane.’ The ‘private’s space of the housing complex was called as though it were a public space. Finally I realized that the residents considered it to be common, a kind of public space.
This ‘Hu-tong House’ has three pavilions on the site surrounded by walls, like hakka house or the house in Bali, Indonesia. Being a semi-public space, the courtyard plays the role of a passage between the three pavilions, like an alley or in Chinese, ‘Hu-tong’. With this project ,I was seeking a prototype for Asian residential space.
