Tianjin, a city of rich Chinese history and tradition, is now becoming the world’s next great architectural battleground. With hundreds of new skyscrapers proposed and under construction each year, however the city’s historical architecture are facing an embarrassing dilemma: most of their preservation remain at a level of mere facade brushing and site cleaning, nothing goes further. The witness of past days doesn’t belong to the city’s ambitious master plan, but to the dusty corner of oblivion.
The renovation and addition of Tianjin’s former French barracks aims to remedy the city’s split trajectories of the development of historical and new architecture. Here the expansion volumes present an overall humble gesture to the existing volumes, while a certain degree of intervention to the latter brings out reciprocity and new dynamics between the old and new.