Villages given urban look through design
Architects from University of Hong Kong establish a foundation with the goal of transforming China's poor rural areas through innovative design
It takes a village to raise a child, says the Yale Book of Quotations. In this day and age, can architecture raise a village?
In some of the poorest areas of China, two assistant professors from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) are demonstrating that it can. Through projects spanning the gamut of vital public infrastructure - schools, health centres, bridges - their work is not only elevating communities through design, it does so on the leanest of budgets.
It happens under the umbrella of Rural Urban Framework (RUF), a not-for-profit research and design collaborative set up by Joshua Bolchover and John Lin in 2005, after the central government announced plans to urbanise half of the mainland's remaining 700 million rural citizens by 2030.
We're trying to help rural villages evolve as meaningful and viable places
The HKU department of architecture colleagues wondered how architecture could respond to the transformation of land from rural to urban. Their interest was piqued on a shared car journey to Huaiji County, Guangdong, where Lin was designing a new village school as part of a design workshop to rethink the ubiquitous, three-storey concrete buildings denoted as standard for schools in rural areas. During the eight-hour road trip, the passing "landscape in transition" sowed the seeds as to how, as architects and researchers, they could "begin to engage in the conditions we were seeing".
"We wanted to bring design into the context of this change," Bolchover explains. "There is not much design in these parts of rural China, so we introduce what's not being offered - by creating architecture projects which are robust, and can begin to respond to the volatility around them through community programmes, public spaces and environmental sustainability concepts."
Most of their projects - 15 completed to date - were undertaken in collaboration with charities, other NGOs, local governments and private donors, Bolchover says.
"In the Qinmo new school which John [Lin) was designing, the question was, what happens to the old school that no longer had a use," Bolchover says. "The village was full of old people and small children - everyone of working age had left." In a solution aimed at re-introducing economic drivers, the old school was renovated as a community centre and demonstration eco-household - a project incorporating a meeting room, dormitory, dining area, communal kitchen and office space.