After determining the function, we focused on three things when choosing the venue: first, mountains, buildings, and farmland landscape, all of which are horizontally spread out along the east-west direction of the Qu River, and we hoped that the venue would have the same qualities; second, the venue should be close to the farmland, which is naturally in line with the theme of food; and third, the venue should have existing buildings that could be transformed; Third, there shall be existing structures on site that may be renovated. Fortunately, we discovered a field walk parallel to the Qu River, with a derelict farm warehouse along the road. On the west side, the warehouse’s wall confronts the main arrival path, while on the south side, the Qu River waterfront is separated by woodland and a new town road. To the north lies a considerable expanse of farmland, over which the field road winds, with rolling hills visible on both sides.

The Warehouse – The reconfigured warehouse primarily serves indoor dining and meal preparation. However, it is also suitable for exhibitions, gatherings, resting, and seminars, with people coming and going in various settings. The building is a typical example of a field, embodying the memories of previously intensive farming labor. Therefore, we did not make many alterations to the overall shape, except adding a new main entrance; the other original holes and old doors and windows were also kept. The new metal roof, which eliminates the leaks in the original roof, is cantilevered outwards on the west side of the building, creating a grey space beneath the eaves that emphasizes the main entry.

The small house’s original roof was no longer functional, and the existing walls were too weak to sustain the new roofing system. To protect the walls from future damage, we installed a new steel and timber structural system on the outside of the ancient house’s facade, with columns gently removed from the existing walls to support the beams and roof independently. We kept the original roof beams to create a memory of the ancient walls without breaking their existing tie stability. The old external structural system visually connects with the long table regarding proportionality.

Because of the new apertures on the west side of the wall and the higher wall’s poor stability, new glued timber ring beams were added to hoop the upper half of the wall, increasing the overall strength of the old building. A natural rock about 2m5 in diameter was discovered near the riverbank in Tingtangxu Village and transported to the spot, where it was attached and stabilized with a slender tie rod to the overhanging beam.

18 – The warehouse is already there, and the long table adds the finishing touch. This 18-meter-long flat surface serves as a conduit for connecting with the local population along the 4-meter-wide field road. Continuing the restaurant’s purpose, the long table extends across the landscape, creating a more natural and public setting. The 18m length takes the scale experience to the extreme, hosting more anticipated gatherings and sharing on an anti-everyday scale. The slightly lower height also allows the long table to directly perceive the body, resulting in a large wooden surface for sitting and lying. Amid the vast site’s grass and trees, we hope this table will take on a new pose, possibly floating, gently caressing the earth it sits on, as if distinct from reality, moving between the mundane and the imaginative.

The consistent span of the construction of the long table space on the overall sense of aggregation has a more substantial impact on the suspension of the way to lessen this separation while also ensuring the continuity of the roof. The lightweight tie bar, if present, indirectly limits space while also occasionally assisting toddlers in climbing up and down. The enclosure and implicit divides above the long table shape how people use the table daily.

From 18 to 42 – To further formally, structurally, and experientially broaden the table’s borders, we stretched the 18-meter-long table to become a 42-meter-long public system. People can meet, picnic, sit, nap, swing, and admire the beauty here, and the field path transitions from a passing space to a place to remain, with more possibilities emerging as time goes on.

The wooden system on both sides of the long table complements the stability of the large-span steel structure in the center and meets the resting needs of villagers and visitors. The swing cloth hanging under the roof is an unexpected favorite, and the 42m public interface, like the shadow cast by the farmhouse in the field under the slanting sun, describes each other in detail. We connect and respond to the two structures at the main entrance to form an integrated expression. The farmhouse serves as an introduction that opens up the situation, which was here before we came. It eventually returns to its origins on the ground and carries the root of all logic.

Mountain & River – Environmental factors determine the overall roof form. As we consider the implicit geometric correspondence and the mimetic relationship between natural geography and artificial things, the long table along the road mirrors the unfolding of the water and mountains, attempting to connect and visualize the delights of the scenery here.

The roof of the promenade is sloped in a one-way profile: to the north, the mountains and fields are elevated to provide a view of the landscape; to the south, the gable end is depressed to block out visual clutter in the direction of the driveway; and to the west, it meets the direction of pedestrian arrival while creating a sense of serenity and peace within the site. The sloping roof follows the formal relationship of the sloping roof of the warehouse while at the same time slightly lowering its stance, implicitly acknowledging the subordination of its ‘furniture’ objects to the main ‘building.’ It is only then that we realize that the final appropriate scale of the project comes from the measurements drawn in the silence of the farmhouse so that we will be manageable and quiet.

While the warehouse’s roofing material was chosen for practical reasons, using a soft tarpaulin on the main body of the long table and the public gallery makes the roofing less solid. The roofing changes in response to the weather and time of day, morphing into a conversation with nature rather than a static landscape that stands alone. The roofing materials are less permanent, but this is quite rustic, retaining the impermanent and unpredictability of the original. The material will gradually age and even disintegrate with the dawn, sunset, and seasons, and the countryside’s texture reflects this natural turnover and non-permanence. The structural body of the steel and wood skeleton will last slightly longer, adding a layer of temporal dimension.

With People – In our view, the relationship between the Long Table and the local area should be more abstract than it requires deliberate interpretation, and it should be more concrete that it limits many possibilities. Especially as outsiders, our understanding of the local context is not profound. Creating a fixed-function, ostentatious intervention with an overly confident approach often results in presumptuous actions that are, in fact, irrelevant and offensive. We intend to leave a localized collective imaginary space, and it is ultimately up to the people to decide how it is filled and written. We have progressively shifted our focus from the extraordinary to the everyday. During the residency and later operation, some villagers expressed their excessive preference for the long table, even with a hint of defense; we were also pleased to see the residents come to the venue to use the extended table following their understanding and exciting interactions occurred one after the other. The relationship between the locals and the locals grew stronger.

With Time – Tingtangxu Village in the Long Table has a fertile field of thousands of miles. Although the water of the Qu River flows year-round, rice, rapeseed flowers, and other food crops are still cultivated in the spring and autumn cycles. Longyou’s rich grain and rice products are also rooted in the profound farming tradition here, which is still indispensable in daily abundance in our lives today. After the project was launched, we came and went to the site many times, during which the golden rapeseed flowers turned into green rice paddies. After the harvest, it was another scene. Other vegetation changed with the seasons and was very rich, and the long table interestingly reflected each other, making it a useful companion.

In the process of thinking about culture, geography, and daily life, we gradually began to reflect on how design can respond to the joint imagination of abstract and figurative, everyday and extraordinary, and then look forward to a discursive intervention to touch upon the topic of rural construction in the current context and to pull the trigger of more different groups of people and their co-operation. Time has become increasingly important in this process. The labor at dawn and the lights at sunset make the construction closer to materiality, rubbing marks of time.
Text provided by the architects.

The polygonal-shaped site is located on a small, highly exposed promontory, a condition that defines both the character of the place and the starting point for the project.

With the aim of achieving the smallest possible built volume, two distinct areas were created: the swimming pool and its surrounding deck at the natural ground level, and the changing facilities on a lower level, covered by the pool deck itself.

The pool is positioned in the central area of the site, at the northern corner of the enclosure, halfway down the existing slope. This location minimizes earthworks—particularly important due to the site’s proximity to the Petouzal Hillfort archaeological area—and allows for maximum integration into the immediate surroundings.

The project seeks a solid, simple, and robust construction, with minimal—or virtually no—maintenance requirements, capable of fulfilling its function sustainably, without discrimination in use, and fully accessible between the two designed levels directly from the surrounding outdoor spaces.

The structure is entirely built in reinforced concrete, using exposed waterproof concrete block walls for both enclosures and internal partitions. These materials offer excellent resistance to the passage of time, intensive use, and adverse environmental conditions, eliminating the need for additional finishes on exterior walls, interior surfaces, and ceilings. The building is covered but not completely enclosed, with no thermal envelope, since its use is exclusively seasonal during the summer months. Consequently, it requires neither heating nor cooling, and ventilation is entirely natural.

Particular attention is paid to user privacy, the overall scale of the complex, and the spirit and traditions of Galician vernacular construction. This is reflected in the masonry work using prefabricated modular elements for interior and exterior paving, inner and outer wall layers, and protective architectural components.

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The intervention is carried out on a former stable and hayloft linked to a pre-existing dwelling, now conceived as an autonomous piece within the ensemble. The building is redefined as a pavilion for collective use, without a fixed program or permanent occupation, capable of hosting gatherings, celebrations, and a variety of activities. This programmatic indeterminacy is key to the building’s rehabilitation, as it allows the technical performance to be adjusted to a real and flexible use, avoiding processes of regularization or over-technification that would have substantially altered its constructive character. Natural ventilation, filtered light, and environmental variation become active components of the architectural experience.

Reading the building as a constructive palimpsest is one of the project’s points of departure. The masonry walls, the different types of openings, and the superimposed structural solutions reveal a construction that has evolved progressively over time. Rather than concealing these traces, the intervention incorporates them as an essential part of the building’s identity, understanding the existing architecture as a structure open to transformation, capable of accommodating new uses without losing the memory of its previous processes.

The roof concentrates the project’s main constructive operation. A structural solution is proposed that fully frees the interior space, avoiding trusses and intermediate supports. A ridge beam integrating a stainless-steel tie working in tension allows a span of up to 15 meters to be bridged. From this beam spring the timber joists, which bear directly on the longitudinal load-bearing walls and on the ridge beam itself, configuring a structural system that is clear, legible, and consistent with the character of the existing building. The system dispenses with superfluous layers, leaving the underside of the tiles exposed to the interior, so that the construction process itself becomes fully intelligible and participates in the spatial definition of the pavilion.

In this context, the roof becomes an interface mediating between a controlled environment and the natural conditions of the site. The tile ceases to function as a finishing element and assumes a central role in the construction of space, acting both as a device that shapes atmosphere and as a support for incorporating the temporal variable into the architectural experience.

The incorporation of continuous surfaces of glass tiles within the same roofing system introduces variations of light and transparency that construct a vibrant, changing sky, reinforcing the intermediate condition of the space between interior and exterior. The limestone cobblestone pavement, treated as an exterior ground surface, links the building to the surrounding karst landscape and helps to blur the boundaries between enclosure and immediate context.

The project thus proposes a form of rehabilitation based on constructive precision and conceptual clarity, in which the intervention does not seek to correct or homogenize what exists, but to activate its spatial and environmental potential. Architecture acts as a mediator between matter and light, between past and present, proposing an open, flexible space capable of accommodating new forms of collective use through an attentive and respectful reading of the built fabric.

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A politically committed and militant project!

Without artifice, the project chooses to highlight natural resources, bio-sourced and local. The timber comes from the nearby spruce forests, sawn and cut by the students of the technical school of wood, implemented by a committed and local company. Almost anecdotal but voluntarist, the project located in the Bugey massif summons the Hauteville stone once used to build Lyon, in a raw and expressive implementation to sit down and take off the building.

In the DRC, the base as emanation of the rocky soil, expresses this minerality through the dialogue of a clear concrete and the Hauteville stone. The program, placed on this base, is all wood, local spruce when it is protected, douglas fir when it is exposed to the vertical and chestnut on the horizontal.

Technically, a wood pellet boiler supplies the building and a wood dryer. A technical gallery, backed by land, contains the electrical pathways, fluids and networks of dual flow ventilation – a pragmatic device that saves the project of any plenum.

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The compact volume, conceived through a passive design strategy to reduce the building’s energy demand, organizes the overall layout. On the access side, it defines a public square; on the other sides, it encloses the more private areas that make up the nursery school spaces: the south-facing classroom patios, the shared patio to the east, and the service strip located on the northern side.
A central courtyard promotes cross ventilation and the entry of natural light. This void creates a new educational space that, while outdoors, is protected from the wind. Its visibility from all interior spaces facilitates supervision and control of the children.
Solar control is optimized through the classroom porch and the incorporation of vegetation within the courtyard. Cross ventilation is planned both in plan and section, enhanced by large openings on the south-facing façades and smaller, higher openings on the northern façade.
The construction adopts a sequence of vaults that evoke the primal sense of shelter through their concave form. The structural system is organized through the repetition, in each bay, of a curved profile made of laminated timber beams. The building is modulated into six bays, each seven meters wide. These beams naturally resolve the slope of the roof. The ceramic roof highlights the path of rainwater. Just as the façade guides the entry of light, the roof shapes the itinerary of water, so that rain ceases to be a mere residue.
This spatial configuration gives rise to a warm and sheltered interior, generating a welcoming atmosphere for early childhood—a place that embraces, protects, and conveys calm.
The building is organized into three longitudinal strips. A central courtyard acts as the heart of the building, arranging the rooms around a continuous circulation. This space not only hosts children but also educates them. Constructive honesty, based on exposing structures, textures, and natural materials—without superfluous finishes or additive layers—turns the space into a didactic support. Matter becomes legible and tangible: what children see and touch explains how the building is constructed.
The impact on natural resources is reduced through the use of materials with a low environmental footprint, both during construction and throughout the building’s life cycle, prioritizing efficient construction systems, materials with controlled life cycles, and passive strategies.
Thermal mass is concentrated in elements in contact with the ground, such as concrete slabs, stone walls, and brick masonry. The roof, more exposed to solar radiation, is resolved as a lightweight, ventilated system with low thermal inertia, whose light-coloured ceramic tiles reduces solar absorption in summer.
The building is supported by a set of active systems that enhance its efficient performance and reduce its environmental impact.
The architecture is based on four principles: a climatic response tailored to the context, high energy efficiency through passive strategies, the use of natural, local, low-impact materials, and efficient technology that supports the building without imposing itself.
The result is a kind and welcoming building, where form, construction, and use combine naturally, giving rise to a comprehensible and habitable space that seeks to integrate respectfully into the landscape.

Text provided by the architects.

The classrooms’ street crosses through the entire facility from east to west, forming another axis structuring the school. Split in two by the interior play area, each part of the axis is embellished with four classrooms and patios. There is a vestibule/cloakroom at each classroom entrance and stands for games, which can be used for pedagogical or playful purposes.

At the intersection of the two axes that structure the school, a large interior play area serves as the genuine central area of the establishment, increasing the number of possible uses. This multi-purpose space can be used in the morning and evening to welcome preschoolers, in addition to the multi-purpose rooms and motricity rooms. In case of heavy rain, it complements the exterior playground but also hosts exhibitions and shows.

The dual-aspect classrooms benefit from multiple sources of natural light and very good ventilation. Their positioning between patios to the north and the school playground to the south ensures different ambiances in the same classroom. To the north, with light pouring in from the patio, a shared space built of wood between two classes creates a peaceful and calm area. To the south, the largest volume of the classes directly overlooking the playground is more collective. Each classroom also benefits from a ‘private’ play area overlooking the ‘common’ playground.

This shaded area improves flows between the interior and exterior, becoming a real extension of the classrooms. The playground, situated to the south and shaded by a line of trees, is shared between kindergarten and elementary classes. A genuine green setting, it is an ideal framework for the discovery of nature and outdoor games. A space dedicated to biodiversity, laid out on the roof, completes the exterior spaces made available. It includes tubs for growing vegetables and large picnic tables, favoring teaching activities related to the natural world. Finally, the playing field will also be accessible during recreation times, thus encouraging the practice of physical activities.

By definition, a school building must make its commitment to the environment visible. This principle has been applied to the project in both the choice of materials and the functioning of the building. The school’s load-bearing stone façades come from the Bonneuil-en-Valois quarry, located less than 60km from the construction site. Its thickness ensures the building’s thermal inertia while enhancing the value of the facility’s sculpted volumes. Between the classrooms, mud bricks are added to the wooden structure, increasing the visibility of natural and bio-sourced materials in the building’s construction.

The patios embellish and punctuate the common areas to the extent that all the spaces of the project benefit from very good natural lighting, fresh air, and comfortable humidity. Their placement naturally ventilates all the areas designed for children, as well as the common areas, which can then become genuine inhabited places and learning areas. The roof of the sporting area is equipped with photovoltaic panels producing more energy than the building consumes. The rest of the roof is planted, which improves thermal performance and total rainwater retention, while also providing inhabitants of the neighborhood with attractive views.

Text provided by the architects.

Stones with Hooks — When the crowds fade away, we can still find traces of the summer in the riverbed. The riverbed has both shallow and deep sections; along the side adjacent to the road, the riverbed has been artificially raised and enclosed with pebbles to form “waterfront private spaces”. When we went down to the riverbank, we noticed that many of the pebbles around these boxes had iron hooks attached. It was easy to deduce that the hooks were installed by the villagers – so that the canopies could be firmly tied to the pebbles during the peak season.

The villagers did not make any rigid, permanent modifications to the river channel cross-section. Instead, they used the local, non-engineering method of moving pebbles to divide the riverbed into functional zones: a safe, shallow recreational area and a deeper, farther flood discharge area. The waterfront spaces, built flexibly with local materials, can be easily restored even after a flash flood – all it takes is piling up the stones again to revive the consumer scene. Movable, sustainable, and low-impact – this is truly a wonderful example of “traceless stream economy” and collective local construction.

Sunshade, Stream Play and River Crossing — There was no need for excessive “groundless” planning; the site itself is alive, and it had already outlined the task at hand: Xialang is beautiful, and it would be even more beautiful with the addition of a canopy for shade, a few steps for easy access to the water, and a line of stepping stones for crossing the river. The operator of the future café on the site had no high requirements for the building area – the space could be accommodated within the footprint of the existing public toilet. This left the remaining outdoor area as the focus of our concept.

First, let’s look at the canopy. Pebbles serve as the structural foundation for the canopies rented out by the villagers. For the “The Grand Canopy”, we decided to use the main structure of the toilet: four partition walls were built to enclose 8 structural columns, forming the higher foundation on one side of the canopy. On the side of the existing dam, four corresponding low piers were built to form the foundation on the other side. Cables were strung between these two foundations – one high, one low, one north, one south – to complete the structural construction of the canopy.

In the sweltering summer, the canopy is unfolded to welcome tourists; during typhoons or rainy days, it is retracted to ensure safety; in the off-seasons of autumn and winter, it is taken down to facilitate maintenance – and there is no need to apply for additional construction quotas. This flexible construction and operation logic takes from the site and gives back to the site. Next, let’s look at the ground landscape. After meeting the requirements of the river’s blue line setback and water conservancy elevation, we designed the ground projection area of the canopy as the starting point for accessing the stepping stones – an enlarged riverbank platform that acts like a “bridgehead”, accommodating crowds gathering and water-based activities.

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Modular timber construction was the natural choice for this project. The school was built by assembling prefabricated elements, allowing for rapid assembly and leaving the possibility of dismantling, reconfiguration or recycling with minimal waste. The prefabricated wooden pavilion rests delicately on masonry bases, which allow
the structure to be raised slightly and ensure optimal ventilation. The heating system is integrated directly into the floor elements. The prefabricated wooden walls, which have fire-retardant properties, delimit the classroom spaces around the central core.
The structure is reinforced by a system of solid wooden posts and slender metal posts supporting the eaves along the edge of the covered gallery.

The large glass façades provide a direct visual connection to the park and a quality of light that is favourable for classroom activities. Each room has dual orientation and direct access to the outside. The gallery surrounding the building provide a buffer zone with the outside and form effective sunshades to prevent overheating during periods of high heat. Despite its temporary nature, the pavilion offers high-quality, comfortable teaching spaces that comply with current standards.

This project was carried out thanks to close collaboration between the project owner, the architect and partner contractors. Smooth communication and coordination between the various parties involved enabled this ambitious project to be completed within a very short timeframe. The speed of design and construction, with two months of construction work for each floor, made it possible to address the saturation of existing school facilities and growing demographic pressure.

Text provided by the architects.