Songyang County
28.5305° N, 119.5321° E

Bishan Village
29.59999° N, 106.21666° E

In 1978, the Chinese government introduced a series of major economic reforms that lifted millions from poverty. Forty-five years later, China is now not only the world’s second-largest economy but has undergone a kind of transformation few countries have experienced, resulting in rapid and unprecedented urbanization that has left rural provinces and villages in a precarious place. This dynamic is central to the practice of architect Xu Tiantian. “While the disparity between rural and urban is global,” she says, “the situation is even more urgent in China,” where the populations of villages have dwindled. As founder of the Beijing-based office DnA_Design and Architecture, she has spent years working with traditional villages in Songyang to revitalize communities through what she describes as “architectural acupuncture.” While these projects carry the potential for all kinds of frictions, they offer “a wonderful experience of mutual learning,” says curator and artist Ou Ning, founder of Bishan Commune, a six-year rural reconstruction and community project. Speaking over WeChat, Xu Tiantian and Ou Ning shared their experiences of working in the Chinese countryside, from the daily challenges to the lasting impact of the rural.

Ou Ning: Over the past decade you have built a body of work that in many ways sits at odds with the assumptions of globalization. More and more of the world’s population is relocating to cities, but rather than taking on projects in urban areas, you have looked in the opposite direction to rural villages. Many of the projects designed by your Beijing-based office are sited almost one thousand miles south of that city, in Songyang County. What is it that made you want to create rural architecture, and what changes have you seen in Songyang?

Xu Tiantian: The disparity between rural and urban is global—for example, I just returned from the village of Referinghausen in the Sauerland, a rural mountain range in the heart of Germany where I took students as part of the design studio I’m teaching at Yale (I would have loved to have taken them to China, but that was impossible due to travel restrictions). For many of these villages whose populations have left for cities, the challenge is how to attract younger people to live and work. The situation is even more urgent in China because so much focus has been placed on urbanization in major cities. This has resulted in regions that have lost significant amounts of their population. Many villages are known as “hollow villages,” where only a few elders remain.

Over the past eight years our office has worked with Songyang County in Zhejian Province to restore its rural identity as well as stimulate circulation between local villages and the county urban center—we call this “Architectural Acupuncture.” Through architectural intervention, a small-scale public program is introduced to each village and tailored to that village’s local traditions and heritage. Drawing on the concept of acupuncture—a traditional part of Chinese medicine which takes a holistic view of the body and its energetic medians—architecture is seen as one element of a larger social structure that forms the village community. In our ongoing work, we discovered that more recently thousands of young people have returned to Songyang from major cities like Hangzhou or Shanghai. Many young families choose to live in the county’s urban center and start new businesses in nearby rural villages, usually no more than an hour’s drive away. Living in a county urban center and working in surrounding satellite villages is becoming a new mode of life. It allows a social infrastructure of education and health care for young families and at the same time provides new opportunities for startups on rural tourism and eco-agriculture in the nearby villages. It’s more resilient and adaptive.

ON: How did your work in Songyang begin?

XT: In the beginning we were commissioned to work on a different project in the county, which is still ongoing. During the first year (2014), wherever we went, whether visiting local tea plantations or ancient villages in the mountains, we were constantly asked for our design opinion or for advice on local village development. We ended up working on over a dozen small-scale pro-bono projects. It was a good learning process for us to understand local ways of building after collaborating with different village construction teams. These villages have been around for centuries, and each has something unique in its history and heritage. So we proposed a systematic collaboration within the county, adopting Architectural Acupuncture as our methodology. It takes extensive research and communication—I call it the “diagnosis process”—to define a program, location, building scale, etc., before even starting on any architectural design. It was a “learning by doing” process, which started with projects related to village culture, history, and agriculture. Later, we moved onto rural regional infrastructure and facilities such as the Water Conservancy Center (2018) or Dushan Leisure Center (2019). We also applied acupuncture to urban neighborhoods where we found hidden histories and cultures. All these elements form a system that connects the county’s urban center to its surrounding villages and rural areas.

The most difficult time was in the beginning, when locals were reluctant to collaborate. But after the first projects were built, more and more villages contacted us, and some even brought their own proposals. Our reason for working in rural environments is the people and seeing how the local community and village can change their perspectives and attitudes by experiencing the result and impact.

ON: The concept of Architectural Acupuncture seems to understand the rural society as a diseased body, and the architect as a healer who makes spatial diagnoses and provides therapy.

XT: The acupuncture strategy is indeed a healing treatment targeting rural issues through collective collaboration between village communities, local governments, architects, local craftsmen, etc. The common symptom is that a village does not have confidence in its future. In general, the architectural intervention is meant to restore village identity, pride, and motivation. For example, the Wangjing Memorial Hall (2017) in Wang Village, named for one of the most important figures in Songyang history, an imperial scholar of the Ming Dynasty and the editor of the fifteenth-century Yongle Encyclopedia. The hall helped to restore a sense of history and pride among villagers. Another example is the renovation of the abandoned Shimen Bridge (2017), which once served as a main thoroughfare for a single village. Over time that single village was split into two: one on either side of the bridge. Rather than demolish the bridge, we proposed converting it into a viewing platform overlooking the Songyi River and the ancient Wuyang Dam. It now also reconnects the two villages. And in Xing, the new Brown Sugar Factory (2016) restores the community’s unique brown sugar production as cultural heritage, while also upgrading the production quality. The factory integrates individual family workshops into one collective economic entity, ensuring a better performing rural economy.

Our architectural interventions in rural regions are not only about employing a certain vernacular, materials, or techniques. Rather, they use a holistic approach that integrates the social and cultural with economic sustainability. As each village restores its own identity, the region eventually builds up a local social and economic circulation.

ON: This rapidity of change can also cause conflict or frictions with locals, no? I read an article in Time+Architecture that mentioned the quarrel and reconciliation between you and a Mr Wang, a craftsman in Pingtian Village. Could you talk about what happened? How do you treat and deal with local craft and traditional construction technology?

XT: The first time we met Mr Wang, he did not trust us at all. I think it had to do with multiple reasons. He did not trust that an outsider—especially a woman architect from the city—would understand local building traditions. As a construction master who normally works on important buildings like ancestors’ halls, he did not believe that a cluster of abandoned farmhouses at the entrance of Pingtian Village was worth renovating. So from the outset he was reluctant about our project. There were a lot of debates and fights, even though the design interventions were minimal. Gradually, though, we saw that Mr Wang’s attitude changed as he started to see the transformation of the original space. The building techniques were still local and traditional, but the adaptation of modern architectural elements, like continuity of space, courtyards, and skylights, totally changed the interior from small dark rooms into an open circulating communal space. He soon became actively engaged, providing knowledge and valuable construction experience. By the end, he was standing under the skylight and telling us that he wanted to build a similar house in his village.

The experience of working together was a learning process for us both. On the one hand, we needed to learn from those with local knowledge and resources. On the other hand, Mr Wang and local craftsmen began to understand and embrace modern concepts of architecture and space, which could transform the vernacular building typology into more adaptive public or community programs. More importantly, local villagers began to realize that, with architectural intervention, even the buildings in the worst condition have value and potential. Isn’t it fascinating when we really start to understand traditional architecture? The vernacular, often called “architecture without architects,” is always a scientific, self-sustained system with local Indigenous wisdoms and a holistic approach with cultural
and economic considerations. The making of a building involves collective collaborations that can also become intangible cultural heritage. In other words, the study and discussion of architecture in rural contexts should expand into more anthropological dimensions.

ON: In this process of understanding and learning in a rural context, the deeper you go, the more you understand its rationality and splendor, and the more you are in awe of the order and beauty it presents.

This text has been excerpted from forA issue #1: Frictions. To read the full conversation, purchase the journal here: https://birkhauser.com/books/9783035628517

Ou Ning was chief curator of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in 2009. In 2011, he founded the Bishan Project to join the rural reconstruction movement in China. From 2016–2017, he taught two courses, “City and Countryside in China” and “Curatorial Practice and Placemaking,” at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. In 2020, he became the senior research fellow of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research in Boston. He lives and works in New York from 2022, and his most recent book is Utopia in Practice: Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Xu Tiantian is the founding principal of DnA _Design and Architecture and Professor in Practice at Tsinghua University. She has engaged extensively in the rural revitalizing process in China. Her groundbreaking “Architectural Acupuncture” is a holistic approach to the social and economic revitalization of rural China and has been selected by UN Habitat as the case study of Inspiring Practice on Urban-Rural Linkages. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2022 Swiss Architectural Award, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2023, and the Berlin Art Prize / Kunstpreis Berlin—Architecture 2023. In 2020, she was appointed an Honorary Fellow of American Institute of Architects.