Beijing, China
Michele Saee Studio

Michele Saee wraps the interior of a Beijing apartment in undulating planes of cherrywood, creating his sinuous Template House

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	Photo © Chen Su
	Designer: Michele Saee
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“I wanted to create a space that embraces the body,” says Michele Saee of the apartment he designed as part of last fall’s Beijing Architecture Biennial. “The idea was to insert a protective layer—like a cocoon or set of clothes—within the existing building’s hard shell.” Italian-educated, Los Angeles–based Saee was one of 10 architects from around the world—including Bernard Tschumi, Odile Decq, Matali Crasset, and Delugan Meissl—selected to design an apartment for an exhibition called Infinite Interiors. Set in a new high-rise tower in the Beijing development of Phoenix City, the exhibition units were completed while the building was still under construction. Though the Architecture Biennial—China’s first—encountered some logistical problems during its three-week run, the interiors proved a big hit. And according to visitor response cards, Saee’s scheme was the most popular.

Here, the architect explored ideas he had first pursued in earlier projects. As far back as the early 1990s, when he designed a pair of stores in the Los Angeles area for Ecru, Saee shaped interior space with folded surfaces that enveloped the occupants and evoked pleated clothing. At the same time, he began using a limited number of fabrication templates to create an apparent abundance of forms. Both this draping concept and the fabrication method informed Saee’s Beijing Biennial design, a project he calls the Template House. But instead of the faceted edges of the Ecru Marina store, the Beijing apartment swaddles its residents in curving panels of bent cherry plywood that create a warm, sensual atmosphere.

With just three weeks for initial design, four weeks for design development, and two months for construction, Saee purposefully devised a building system that he could explain easily and deploy from his far-away base in California. The system relies on just three plywood templates—one for the walls and two for the ceilings—to generate the apartment’s many curves. He originally hoped to fabricate the 4-by-8-foot plywood panels off-site and assemble them inside the apartment. In the end, though, it proved easier for the contractor to build everything on-site, drawing more on old-fashioned handicraft than digitally controlled methods.

Since the tower was already under construction when Saee began his design, he had limited options for laying out the apartment. Existing plumbing stacks determined the bathroom and kitchen locations, and, of course, the building’s poured-concrete shell set an inflexible perimeter. But instead of hiding these constraints, the architect incorporated them into his design.

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