Embracing Uncertainty: Experiments in Making from the Chinese Countryside

Abstract

Working in rural China is unlike other countryside: it is full of contradiction, neither rural nor urban, both traditional and modern, abandoned in some areas and yet others are becoming cities overnight. It is in fact a laboratory for new ways of living. And it has become our laboratory for new ways of making architecture. Whereas contemporary architecture since the advent of modernism has developed increasingly controlled, prototypical, and standardized mechanisms for building, our experiments embrace the opposite: a lack of control, taking place within the flux of political, social and economic uncertainties.