Babel Architectures, based in Tel Aviv, is one of the participant teams of Ordos 100, an operation by various Chinese's developers to create in the Mongolian desert a new settlement designed by 100 international architects (see Domus 918). The architect in charge of Babel, Sharon Rotbard, explains the project: "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.

The Villa is composed by two types of spaces separated by a camouflage carpet – two brick skin cubes that house the private spaces of the villa's owner and worker above the ground and over the carpet; common reception spaces at the underground level, under the carpet.

Over the Carpet: the private spaces of the villa's owner and the villa's worker are located in two distinct cubes juxtaposed side by side.. Each cube materializes by its size its relative portion in the program. The two cubes are covered with brick skin. Since in China gray brick is twice more expensive than the red brick, the big cube of the villa's owner is covered by a gray brick skin and the small cube of the villa's worker is covered by a red brick skin. The two cubes have separate and private access from the main underground entrance floor and from the ground floor camouflage carpet.

Carpet: most of the plot is covered by a generic carpet that reproduces a "Woodland" standard camouflage pattern. This generic camouflage landscape hides all the common and luxurious parts of the villa from curious gazes either from the street or from Google Earth. The camouflage pattern of the landscaping will be formed by hollow paving –upside down hollow concrete 2 holes (40/20/20) blocks. According the pattern, the hollow parts will be filled with different plants or fillings (chosen according the seasons or taste). The carpet is perforated by square openings in 3 measurements.

Under the Carpet: protected from sandstorms and wind, the underground level houses the entrance and the reception areas, 3 inner gardens and patios, swimming pool and common and leisure facilities in one open space".

Credits
Architects: Babel Architectures (Sharon Rotbard, Dan Hasson, Yuval Yasky) Location: Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China Architect in Charge: Sharon Rotbard Project team: Sharon Rotbard, Dan Hasson, Yuval Yasky Collaborators: Shira Gleitman, Jessy Feng, Igor Shevchenko, Amit Mandelkern, Omer Barr Structural Engineer: Yitzhak Rokah Photos: Roee Boshi Design year: 2008 Construction year: 2009 Curator: Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China Client: Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, Inner Mongolia, China