The study site for the studio is Zhiying Village, Yongkang City, Zhejiang Province in Southeast China, about 350km to the south of Shanghai. The settlement dates back to before the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), and about 43% of the structures are considered “traditional.” Zhiying is divided into eight individual villages and together they comprise a “national historic and cultural” village. The village is about 0.68km2, with about 0.08km2 built area. The population is 1,065. Industries include agriculture and metal-working. The village has kept the urban structure of the Ming Dynasty, with 8 north-south alleys and 10 east-west alleys and has a number of old courtyard style dwellings and temples. The most distinctive feature of the village is the unusually high number of temples or public halls. There are over 50 still standing. They represent the social order of the village as well as that of the Ying family, which traces its ancestral roots to the site. 

The travel component included a joint workshop with Shanghai University. Wentworth students participated in site visits, lectures and charettes with the students of the department of architecture at Shanghai University and Professors Liu Yong, Xiao Rong and Zhang Wei while in China, and held digital reviews during the semester. Shanghai University students continued to work in parallel. The Shanghai University Design Institute coordinated with the Zhiying government and arranged for students to engage with the government and local people, and prepared detailed documentation of the site. The studio will focus on two scales. Site analysis and proposals for the old town as it relates to the wider context at the urban scale, and the architectural design of individual structures, both adaptive and new. The outcome of the studio is a print publication to be shared with Shanghai University, its Design Institute and the Zhiying Town Government. 

Thematic research may include: 

Street culture - The rituals and patterns of daily social life, and cultural practices of using the street as a semi-private / semi-public space. 

Traditional architecture

Quotidian building - Modern vernacular / informal architecture including self-built houses, structures, additions. 

Porosity - Residents used to bring bamboo chairs out on to the street after dinner on warm evenings, to cool down, and to socialize. We relate the ideas of porosity to connectivity, as well as passive cooling. 

Material re-use - Ingeniously constructed assemblages of building materials can be found all over the site, testifying to the creativity and resourcefulness of the residents. Also the work of Chinese architect Wang Shu, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2012. Wang’s work is defined by a sense of place and material re-use. 

Ruins - Recent Chinese artists’ responses to the widespread demolition of older urban fabric in the wake of rapid urbanization; often working with the debris or sites of demolished buildings. 

Metal working - the region is known for the craft of tin and copper working.