‘Every village has a structure of memory,’ Wang explains. Indeed, some of the elderly locals playing ping-pong today worked at that company decades ago. In recent years, the focus of China’s economy has shifted towards high-tech enterprises, such as Hangzhou’s Alibaba Cloud City, or the Wuzhen Internet Conference – both relatively nearby – and the village has become a quiet place, with ageing structures populated by older people. Many remember when the place was still the staff quarters for a fabric mill in the former planned economy in the 1980s, Shaoxing’s textile industry became nationally important, and even a globally significant export as China started at the bottom of the global value chain and slowly worked its way up. Finally, a garage was opened up, creating a veranda-like space that serves as a focal point. Canals for flowing water were added to the roof, creating a soothing sonic background for visitors to the complex. The team started by peeling the concrete surface of the walls to expose the brickwork underneath, removing interior staircases and extraneous blockages with this done, air and people could circulate more freely. While Wang’s renovation sees the building aestheticised to a certain extent, with warm materials such as wood for a tea alcove, and the clever use of water and brick, the restrictive budget and the need for structural reconstruction – knocking down walls, modernising the building’s bones – led Wang’s team to keep it simple, with a post-industrial aesthetic that the adjacent community will be familiar with. Zhejiang’s GDP per person has more than doubled since 2010 China was a completely different country in 1980. The built environment of previous generations is the legacy of a China that was radically poorer in living memory. Motorbikes in dirty hallways, phone numbers spray-painted on the wall for local businesses, mould and rust claimed the building, and an unfinished second floor completed the sense of dereliction and abandonment.
Rebuilt in the skeleton of a former workers’ barracks in 2018, local residents – many of whom are older people – use the centre to sing and play musical instruments, play ping-pong, and perform traditional rites such as bundling zongzi (rice dumplings) in bamboo leaves for the dragon boat festival, cultivating the human connectivity that daily interaction creates.īefore Wang arrived, the building was a generic concrete block with two concrete workrooms to one side. The community centre for Luobei reclaims an old, forgotten building to house gardens, art galleries, low-key exercise facilities, tea rooms, roof gardens and work alcoves. Many villages in China are half-abandoned, populated only by older people and the very young, but in the coastal provinces, rural economies are increasingly invigorated by traffic to and from cities, with architects like Wang Hao of Atelier Untitled Architects reviving communities that often host visitors from the cities on weekend breaks.
During the past few decades, as China’s urban economy has driven a mass migration from the agricultural folkways of the country towards industrial landscapes, architecture has been overwhelmingly oriented towards the construction of new cities as China’s economy cools and matures, architects are engaging in slower, more human-oriented work in the countryside, questioning Chinese cultural identity, how humans can live in harmony with nature, and what activities might take place in environments that remain rural. The centre for older people by Atelier Untitled Architects in Zhejiang Province is an idyllic test case for China’s hope for common prosperityĪtelier Untitled Architects’ community centre in the village of Guiyuan and Luobei area, just outside Shaoxing city in Zhejiang province, exemplifies a reengagement between architects and China’s rural communities.
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