The 1000m2 house is one of 100 villas currently being designed by 100 international architects selected by Herzog & DeMeuron as part of a new residential district in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. The project has been masterplanned and curated by FAKE Design, the Beijing practice of architect and artist Ai Wei Wei.

The character of the house, for an art collector and gallerist, establishes continuity with the tradition of the villa, as a compact and ordered figure between city and landscape. A public route along one edge of the plot forms the beginning of a meandering journey to the central green space of the masterplan. This is articulated by a tiny public space, from where a passer by can admire the ensemble of neighbouring houses.

Rather than dispersing the extensive programme around a series of courtyards, the villa is reduced to a singular dense volume from which secondary elements extend into, or are carved out of, the landscape. These offer a series of intimate, domestic scaled exterior spaces, taking advantage of orientation. The villa is a house of rooms, primarily experienced through movement from room to room. The section is manipulated to create rooms of different scales and proportions.

The villa contains within itself a microcosm of the larger site and can be read as an ensemble of ‘houses’ which merge and overlap: a family house; a more formal house, which can accommodate guests and social functions; a little house for the staff, with its own front door and private exterior space and finally a house for art, where a series of potential display spaces exist beyond the formal gallery space.

The density of the villa is both expressed and denied in the tectonic of the façade. At its base, brickwork expresses the mass of the material and the thickness of the wall. Above a change in brick bond and a corresponding step in section, suggest a lightening of load whilst revealing the brick face as a skin, supporting only itself. In places this transforms into a delicate fretwork of open joints describing a fabric like patterning of light and shadow, through which a viewer might catch a glimpse of what lies beyond.

The denial of the wall as the element that supports the building is made emphatic through the introduction of a further layer of refinement, in the form of a delicate bronze frame. The relationship of brick, frame and window establish an ambiguous tectonic character for the exterior of the building. The frame undertakes the real task of tying the façade and forming lintels whilst also signifying the structural concrete frame and the arrangement of the interior volumes. Each face of the villa is, at once, figurative and abstract, decorous and purposeful.