Oil Workshop

Hengzhang Village is located in Dadongba Town, Songyang County. The village has a long history and preserves lots of cultural relics and historical sites. The old oil workshop at the village entrance was built over one hundred years ago.

This traditional wooden structure & rammed-earth wall building sits on a sunken site next to a creek, houses a water-powered trip-hammer, two sets of wooden oil expeller, a corner kitchen and a mezzanine lounge. The Workshop also served as a shared milling facility for villagers but has been abandoned for decades.

In October 2017, an extension plan has been programmed to reutilize the oil workshop as production and leisure space for both the village community and tourists, and also as an architectural acupuncture strategy to revitalize this traditional village.

The extension started by preserving the main building and the interior wooden machinery. The program also expanded out to a kitchen and a packing space on the side, and a leisure pavilion with viewing platform by the creek.

These new additions are traditional “Mortise and Tenon” wooden structure, and wrapped by masonry walls to create a continuous landscape with the terrace fields and the creek.

The articulation of roof system not only creates a roof-scape of different functions, but also introduces natural light into each space. The construction is done by local building material and technique. This allows building to fit with both context and limited acupunctural budget。

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