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Population explosion, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and the tumultuous pace of city life are “urban diseases” afflicting many contemporary cities in many parts of the world. This is especially true of China, where cities have mushroomed over the past 30 years. As a result, an increasing number of scholars and architects have turned their attention to the city’s counterpart - the village, seeing a return to rural lifestyles in Utopian terms. In fact, the Chinese word for “nostalgia” (乡愁, or xiang chou) literally means “the memory of and desire for one’s village”. In response to the “FreeSpace” theme proposed for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale by the exhibition’s two curators from Grafton Architects, Dr. Li Xiangning, curator of the China Pavilion has chosen to entitle his country’s exhibition “Building a Future Countryside”. More than twenty projects from Chinese villages will showcase construction in China’s contemporary villages and rural societies, cultural reconstruction, and explore future developments. The essential rural functions of dwelling and producing still continue to play an important role in rural construction today. Dong Yugan’s guest quarter and courtyard of house Erli reproduce the spatial distribution typical of the gardens of the Jiangnan region south of the Yangtze River, intertwining ancient cultural traditions with features harking back to pastoral ideals. The Yangliu Village reconstruction by Hsieh Ying Chun makes uses of cutting-edge industrialized production and logistics to “relocate” the rural living model. For the architect, our era resembles that faced in the early 20th Century by the Deutscher Werkbund. Today’s task, he says, is to provide new answers within an industrialized context. On this same theme, Xu Tiantian’s Brown Sugar Workshop (The Plan 100) in Zhangxi, Songyang County, recreates a...
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The University of Design
Emilio Ambasz
Articolo tratto dal libro The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post Technological Society, che raccoglie gli atti dell’omonima conferenza tenuta...
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