Chinese puzzle box: a house in Nanjing has a pleasing spatial intricacy.

Though at first glance this might appear to be yet another clinically austere Japanese house, it is in fact in China, in the eastern city of Nanjing. Architect Zhang Lei looks as though he has picked up some Tokyo moves - the formal abstraction and the obsessive use of limited materials (concrete and timber) - but there is also a sense of striving to create something genuinely thoughtful and resonant amid the dislocated ferment of the current Chinese architectural scene.

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Nanjing is experiencing the now familiar tumult of China's accelerated development. 'Even though we use half of the world's cement in China,' says Zhang Lei, Slit House is the first real concrete building in Nanjing, a city that has built 1300 high-rise structures in the last 25 years'. In Zhang's hands the maligned, functional concrete is poetically transformed into a subtly textured skin marked by narrow bands of formwork. But it also has a solidity and depth, incised with a chasm-like slit of glazing that marks a half level difference between the two ends of the house, as if the entire structure had been pulled gently apart by a giant.

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The kitchen and double-height living space are contained in the basement level, lit by a series of narrow courtyards or areas. Bedrooms occupy the intermediate floors, with the topmost attic storey devoted to a library and reading room. Volumes neatly interlock around a central zone of circulation and light percolates around the ascetic interiors from carefully positioned apertures. Among Nanjing's brick backstreets, Slit House is quietly emblematic of a new way of thinking about architecture. C. S.

Architect

AZL Atelier Zhanglei, Nanjing

Project team

Zhang lei, Tang Xiao Xin, Lu Yuan

Photographs

Nacasa & Partners

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