17 June 2019
Designed by MQ Studio, the modernist PuXuan Hotel and Spa is the latest luxury offering from urban resort concepts located just a stone’s throw away from The Forbidden City.
The design of the hotel does not celebrate an aesthetic, but the city out of which it was born. The Puxuan Hotel and Spa is a 116 spacious and luxuriously appointed guest rooms hotel located on the NE corner of the Forbidden City opposite the Capital Art Museum, with the upper portion of the hotel allowing for uninterrupted views of the former Imperial Palace.
The mixed-use development in which it is housed is by Buro Ole Scheeren, famed for the CCTV tower also in Beijing, whilst as part of OMA. According to Ole, the ‘pixelated’ volumes of the lower portion of the building subtly refers to the adjacent historic urban fabric, echoing the grain, color and intricate scale of Beijing’s Hutongs. It is within these pixelated boxes that the Guardian Art Centre (China’s oldest auction house) and part of the hotel F+B functions is housed.
The glazed upper portion of the building responds to the larger scale of the surrounding modern city of Beijing and houses the main body of the hotel rooms and the spa.
Through rigorously applying a set of parameters to the design, a number of observations were created that could inform the interiors and how they could be composed.
Strategizing from the larger glazed floating ring of the building, that creates an inner courtyard at a macro scale, and then through a series of continuous scale shifts, further programmatic courtyards were placed throughout the hotel. The overall effect was to create a layered spatial composition of arranged illuminated volumes throughout the guest spaces- either artificially or natural lit.
Whether reflecting the changes of the season, or simply just the time of the day there is a continuous resonating connection to the architectural typology the courtyard of Beijing and as a larger critique of the architecture of Buro Ole Scheeren. MQ studio was responsible for all interior design, hotel styling, art decoration and landscape associated to the hotel.
Photo: Zhu Hai, Jiao Yang