Shaping Changes

By Li Xiangning, Xiong Xuejun - 1 March 2022

As a repository of nostalgia in contemporary China, the countryside embodies the desire to escape from urban life and return to the pastoral idyll of popular imagination. After the Building a Future Countryside exhibition at the Chinese Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale, Chinese rural architecture is now familiar to the general public and media. With the countryside now the medium connecting the profession of architecture with collective cultural awareness, new opportunities have arisen to revitalize and revive the rural environment.

Line+’s rural practice seems to have started with the opportunity it was given to design a project in Dongziguan Village. The rapid dissemination over the Internet and mass media of images of the project with its traditional whitewashed walls led the firm to develop a rural design strategy to promote rural economic and social revitalization. This granted again wide media coverage and opened up numerous design opportunities for this young, newly established firm, whose subsequent projects further developed and consolidated this strategy.

The Stray Bird Art Hotel·Songyang Chenjiapu was the first to explore the possibility of preserving the rammed earth walls of the original dwellings through consolidation with embedded light steel structures. The many transparent glass walls installed in this B&B allowing outlooks onto the surrounding landscape became a signature feature of line+’s subsequent expressive language. The Teahouse in Jiuxing Village adopts a different approach with the use of concrete. However, although an artificial material, the concrete’s delicate surface texture from the timber formwork gives it a natural, rough tactile feel. The material is also used on a human scale in harmony with its rural setting. In addition, the stepped design of the Teahouse creates an organic relationship with the mountain as well as allowing the building to reach out to the...