Drawings, Blur Hotel (2004–2006), Beijing, China 中國北京模糊酒店（2004至2006年）繪圖

The Blur Hotel (now Hotel Kapok) in Beijing is an early project by Studio Zhu-Pei. The hotel is a renovation of a 1980s five-storey office building east of the Forbidden City. In addition to opening up the ground floor, the design includes two strategies: inserting vertical courtyard spaces and wrapping a new envelope around the exterior. The architects retained the original concrete slab-and-column structure while cutting through floor plates to create voids on certain levels. The voids form semi-public areas, such as gardens and lounges, connecting rooms and bringing light into the interior. The new skin—a translucent green fibreglass grid—covers the facades. This additional layer both masks the existing exterior and creates a lantern effect whereby activity and light glow behind the screen. The Blur Hotel’s design offers an alternative to demolition and provides an example of how clients can renovate and reactivate older structures and generate a dialogue between past, present, and future. This approach responds to a context without mimicking it. Zhu Pei describes such projects as a form of acupuncture, or a localised intervention in the urban fabric.