ABSTRACT
Beijing has a long and rich housing history that dates back over 3,000 years, and housing architecture has very slowly evolved over this period. More recently, Beijing has become one of the most rapidly modernizing and urbanizing cities in the world. In the early 2000s, building construction was accelerating at a rapid pace. New large-scale, mixed-use residential developments began to appear in the city and housing architectural design evolved rapidly. One of the housing typologies that has been recurring and is reinterpreted from the former traditional courtyard house is the space-enclosing structure, and Beijing has remade it as its own. A space-enclosing structure is a building or set of buildings that create and enclose open spaces; is a version of linear blocks that is bent, angular, sinuous, or curved in building form; can be a single building that folds or contours to create one of many open spaces; can be a series of similar-shaped buildings that form an enclosure around one or many open spaces; and the building form does not necessarily conform to the characteristics of the existing block.
