Communing with the future

The Bamboo Wall House tea roomfloats on a shallow pool.

The future of housing begins under concrete beams in the basement of the deliberately rusting Clubhouse with a man talking about inkjets.

Actually it's not a basement, it's a former indoor, Olympic-size swimming pool, boarded over through lack of use.

Things are often not what they seem in Beijing and here, at the command post of the Commune by the Great Wall, one is hoping the future holds something more than the latest in Hewlett-Packard printers.

The Commune is a misnomer. Or perhaps an irreverent nod to the past from a defiantly modern China. The Clubhouse's steel plate walls are left to rust so the building will harmonise with the environment - apparently symbolising, not unlike the nearby Great Wall, "the legacy of civilisation in nature".

Armies of slightly sinisterly clad staff - in black uniforms with a small red star on their chest, like Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution - add to the joke.

But this boutique hotel is no workers' paradise. If there is a commune here, it's of the upper class, a playground for the rich and famous where the only sharing likely would be a bottle of Moet on a villa deck while watching the sunset over the Shuiguan valley hills.

The folly began in 2002 when the darlings of China's property boom, husband and wife developers Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, commissioned 12 of Asia's hot architects to show what housing could be. The result is 12 monuments to architects' egos and a measure of how east meets west and old meets new in today's China.

Computer giant Hewlett-Packard has entered this modern architecture museum to showcase the next frontier - the digital home.

But it's an uneasy marriage. There's little sign the architects have conceived of such a future in their designs, the result being computers trailing a spaghetti of power cords and network wires stuffed awkwardly into rooms. Then there's HP's rather lame vision of the digital future - funky coloured "media centre" PCs scattered around, each inevitably with an inkjet printer attached. There are no solar panel arrays, computer-controlled climate systems, talking fridges, robotic vacuum cleaners or intelligent toilets.

At least the architecture is interesting. Most of the Commune houses grapple with the siheyuan - the vernacular Chinese house contained by a walled perimeter with rooms facing inward to a central courtyard. It's a form that speaks of security, of peace and quiet, of privacy and of family within. But here the architects have thrown its conventions to the winds.

Furniture House, built of laminated strips of bamboo, explodes the closed form with floor to ceiling glazing that breaks through to the outside and to the internal quadrangle.

Twin House busts the courtyard open through its diagonal with two L- shaped floor plans, one smaller than the other, facing inwards. There's a similar theme in Split House, with its V-shaped courtyard, and the L-shaped Forest House and both open out to panoramic views.

These are houses that want to commune with nature - to create a pastoral retreat, an escape perhaps from the pace of change in bustling Beijing.

Distorted Courtyard House takes the shape of a parallelogram with an upper level that looks out, as well as peering into the skewed square below.

Bamboo Wall House, with an outer facade of bamboo poles, has its courtyard inside under its roof. At its centre, a tea room island floats on a shallow square pool and opens, shrine-like, to the view through a bamboo curtain.

Cantilever House is three storeys high and looks magnificent nestled on the side of a bush-clad hill. Its oblong courtyard is half inside and half out. The inner square forms a double height lounge which opens to a generous verandah and upwards to the top floor rooms. The outside courtyard is encircled by a narrow ramp which spirals up to an expansive roof deck, affording views of the Great Wall snaking across the hills, and really does take your breath away. There is no balustrade, just a low perimeter bench.

But if HP's vision sees only as far as next year's product range, it does raise the biggest challenge of living with personal computers. Despite a quarter-century of product development, the PC is still a pig of a machine to use.

It's a dysfunctional relationship that shows little sign of improving, especially as PCs are asked to process an ever-increasing variety of media - internet, TV, CD, DVD, iPod, digital camera etc. Amid the Commune's natural serenity and architectural purity, one gets the sense that such technology doesn't belong.

The content avalanche does, however, create a digital home problem.

"The amount of content stored on PCs, set-top boxes and other electronic devices in a typical networked home is projected to increase from 800 gigabytes today to over four terabytes by 2010."

A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, big enough to store about 240,000 digital songs, or 6000 CDs, or 33 30-gigabyte iPods. Or about 375 hours of TV.

That leads to a question no one wants to answer - how many PC users regularly back up? The deepest fear in the digital home is what happens if one, or several, of these storage devices irretrievably fail. Family photos, music collection, home videos, and other digital debris gathered over a lifetime all gone.

But no one seems to care. HP's answer is that homes should have a whopping network storage box that not only enables the family to share its content, but also automatically backs it up. Great. Maybe in another 25 years, when we have good relationships with our PCs, such a device will actually work.

By then architects may also automatically design for such a thing. But now, the digital lounge HP has planted in Forest House is an awkward fit.

The idea of a house that's endlessly adaptable to changing needs is beautifully expressed in architect Gary Chang's Suitcase House - an oblong box 44m long and 5m wide that hangs in space cantilevered from its service rooms base. There is no courtyard here, just a container not unlike a passenger aircraft fuselage or a bus.

Inside, the open plan space can be divided by pneumatically assisted floor panels that flip up to reveal sunken chambers - a kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms and storage.

The oblong fuselage form finds expression in two other Commune designs. See and Seen House is smooth and white with a horizontal slit window and raked ends making it lean forward to the view - as though it's pushing forward in a hurry. The notion of a house as a place of travel is played out in Airport House with its long corridor (arrival hall) from which are slung protruding glazed spaces resembling departure lounges.

Just-flown-in is not a bad description of the Commune - architects arrive and leave a mark. The developers' original intention was that the scheme would establish some sort of Chinese identity in architecture. And that it could be a place that others would visit, appreciate the architecture, the gorgeous scenery and hiking tracks to unreconstructed sections of the Great Wall.

The location is also drawing the corporate market. Sharp shot an advert in Bamboo Wall House, BMW launched its 7 Series on the marble courtyard of Furniture House and HP has flown in 80 journalists from the Asia-Pacific region to show off its fabulous photo printers.

Has the US$24 million ($37 million) investment worked? There's no doubt the Commune is high maintenance. Some of the houses are looking decidedly tatty and the high cost of renting the villas has meant the location has been enjoyed only by an elite clientele.

But phase two, including the building of a spa and a kids' clubhouse, is under way. Four of the villa designs are also being replicated, adding 21 more houses that will allow tourists to rent by the room.

There's no doubt, too, that while many of the architectural ideas appear to be modernist Western imports, something else has happened in the process. Courtyards have been mangled, bamboo re-invented and oblong boxes have landed.

In the shadow of the Great Wall, there is an implacably Chinese vision of the future.

* Chris Barton travelled to Beijing as a guest of Hewlett-Packard.