This project by Babel Architecture is located in lot #90 of the Ordos 100 project in Inner Mongolia, China.

The following text is from the architects:

‘1.The existence of a class society is a necessary condition for the making of a villa.
The villa is a residential building type designed for the upper classes. It demonstrates pleasures and wealth; it expresses and promotes values such as luxury, privacy, exclusivity and comfort; it symbolizes the middle class’ longing and fantasies, its gaze upward in the class hierarchy; it is the adequate built representation of high class.
In order that a house could be regarded as a villa, it should be able to isolate itself from its surrounding, to appropriate exclusively its own property and to have its environment cleared as much as possible of other architectural or urban noises in order to stand as a singular, unique phenomenon.
Although villas are designed to meet the upper classes’ needs, demands and aspirations, in most cases they are also inhabited by other members of the society. The size and the complexity of this building type, as well as its heavy infrastructures and high standards of comfort, suggest that many of the domestic tasks would be performed by other people than the villa’s inhabitants: the meal will be cooked by the cook, the lawn will be mowed by the gardener and the bed will be made by the maid. Sometimes, in order to fulfill their tasks, the workers must live in the villa or in the villa’s compound, thus becoming not only the proprietor’s workers but also his tenants and neighbors.
Wherever and whenever it may be, this aspect of the villa re-introduces into the very interior of the house the social tensions of the city and its class struggles. For centuries, the complex in-door drama between the served and his server, the upstairs and the downstairs has been one of the favorite subjects of world’s literature, art, theatre and cinema; But when it comes to the architecture, this aspect of the villa has tended to be taken for granted, ignored, silenced or dissimulated. The reason for this is that the everyday tasks and routines of the villa have to be performed spontaneously, automatically, invisibly. The cooked meal, the mowed lawn and the made bed should be perceived as little miracles, as effects with no apparent causes, events with no consequences. Therefore, the personnel’s quarter in upper classes’ houses is often located in a discrete part of the building or its compound– in the basement, at the attic, in a remote wing, behind the laundry room, near the garage.
Le Corbusier, who was far to be suspected for being a socialist (in one of his first book’s chapters he even suggested that modernist architecture could prevent a socialist revolution [1]), might have been one of the only modern architects who had ever referred to this topic. When he promised that in his revolutionary ‘Citrohan’ villa the servants shall be treated with respect, he at least acknowledged the existence of servants in the villa and the need to keep them happy in order to maintain a public order. In many of his built villas he tried to keep this promise. But too often, and despite their sincere aspirations and discourses in favor of social progress, when they had to design villas, many modern architects helped their clients to sweep this issue under the carpet, and to dissimulate it under euphemisms such as ‘friends’ rooms’ or ‘guests’ rooms’, thus denying the very existence of a class system within the dwelling. The need to hide this problematic issue is an essential part of any villa program: as a typical architectural expression of the liberal economy, the villa ‘rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace’.[2] Or in other words: the villa exhibits wealth, but hides its social price, labor.

2.This social tension between classes, which is inherent in any villa’s program anywhere on the globe, becomes even more acute when the villa is located in the socialist People’s Republic of China.
As it may be found in any villa’s program, the program of the Ordos100 project includes, among its many other ingredients, small housing facilities for a ‘worker’.
One may add to this the carefully branded envelope of the whole Ordos 100 project: the location of the new neighborhood within the ‘cultural park’ at the outskirts of the new city of New Ordos besides a new contemporary art museum, a ‘gourmet restaurant’ and a ’boutique hotel’; the luxurious program of the villas (entertainment center, gym, swimming pool, extra bedrooms); the 100 ‘international architects’ flown to Ordos in order to erect, in total liberty of expression, new houses on the dunes (like in Tel Aviv); the massive media coverage and the role and the presence of the neighborhood’s master plan designer Ai Weiwei.
In that sense, the participation in this project as well as the physical construction of such a villa within this context contributes not only to the importation and promotion of capitalist values in China, but also to the reconstruction of a Chinese class society.

3. In our project, we wished to investigate the possibility of a villa within socialist conditions, to explore the very frontier zone that lies between the professional responsibility of the architect and his social responsibility. Since the existence of a class system has already been embedded in the villa’s program, we chose a strategy in which the villa is presented as a moment of hesitation between an unprincipled peace and an ideological struggle, as a site of conflict between architecture and revolution, and as a battleground on which a new class struggle is likely to take place.
We tried a somewhat opposite approach to the traditional villa:
The Double Class Villa exhibits labor and hides wealth. The visibility of its inherent class system seems to us a proper and necessary price for luxury.
We also thought that it would be proper to reduce the gaps between the two classes living in the villa and chose to transfer few elements of the program from the “owner” to the “worker” (why should one need to have 2 living rooms, 2 dining rooms and 2 parking places?), and to equalize as much as possible the living conditions. If capitalist values and rules of games are to be introduced into a socialist society, they have to be distributed as equally as possible, to make capitalism accessible for everyone.’

For more pictures visit: www.babelarchitectures.blogspot.com.