Rolling Field

(Conceptual Design)

Team: Hu Zhile, He Zixi, Li Jialu, Wu Fugang 

Today the countryside is obsolete, with an ageing and declining population, but it is an essential part of human society. The Roll Up the Fields proposal re-evaluates the relationship between urban and rural communities and seeks to clarify what the "barrier" is between urban and rural communities and to use spatial design to bridge that gap and re-establish The design of the project is based on a study of the relationship between urban and rural communities.

The Qingshan Village in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, was chosen as the site for this study. In Qingshan Village, there are three groups of people: Famers, Villagers, and Tourists, all of whom live in the village but have little interaction with each other - Famers lack confidence in the local culture, and Tourists focus on the natural beauty and ignore the vernacular culture. The angle of the design is how to eliminate the differences in the perception of vernacular culture among different groups of people and transform the rural residual space into an installation that brings people together.

The architect extracts the perception and active imagination of the four scenes from different perspectives and superimposes them within a single plane to produce surprising connections and interpenetration of life. The architectural form extracts three architectural elements of three groups of people: the village house, the tent, and the art installation pavilion, and combines them to create a distinctive architectural form. The lives of different groups of people are compatible with each other, a place for mutual recognition and learning.

The selected edges of the fields are rolled up as a subtle gesture for the public. The "3 x 3" grid module is abstracted by careful research of Qinshanchun, a village that is 42km away from Hangzhou downtown. It links the local water source protection area and the village downtown. Residents can work on the farmland, while the paths and lifted areas are provided as multifunctional spaces for the preplanned interactions between visitors and natives. This field system could be applied to other Urban-Rural boundaries with similar situations.