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Conceived as an Inner House within an Outer House, nARCHITECTS’ villa combines two distinct spatial and thermal conditions. The Inner House is designed as a compact, essential house, containing 60% of the project’s total volume and 75% of its area. Outer House provides a protective enclosure, and a unique series of interconnected, voluminous, sky-lit spaces.

This layered strategy responds to the extreme swings of the Ordos desert climate with efficiencies in climatic and material strategies. At the same time, Villa-Villa provides its inhabitants with a variety of modes of living, as they occupy a house that expands and contracts according to the seasons.

For the 2009 Seoul Design Olympiad, we designed a 1:7.5 scale model of the villa. Working with engineers from Arup NY to measure the temperatures throughout the villa on a typical winter day, we mapped the temperatures as colored dots onto the mdf surfaces of the model. The model expresses the thermal performance of the villa rather than its material qualities.

Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Lltd
Location: Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
Status: Construction Documentation
Dates: 2009
Sq Footage: 10,000sf
Program: Villa
Environmental: Smaller conditioned/heated “inner” house within larger “outer” house

Design Team: Eric Bunge, Mimi Hoang | Alice Wong | Dominique Gonfard, Hubert Pelletier

Collaborators: Curator/Masterplan: Ai Weiwei/FAKE Design | MEP and Structural Engineers: Arup