Urban China Matrial 04: Peasant Mansions

Well, I am still working on a book with my friends at Urban China magazine. And after a month spent in fearsome battle, I’ve finally managed to slay the Chinglish Dragon and have officially moved on from editing to design. So I’m gonna put up a few more things as the process goes along.

Here’s a page I laid out today dissecting changes to housing in the Chinese countryside. The introduction of free market money has done wild things to village life, particularly from an architectural standpoint. The houses of the most affluent farmers are often similar to the one above, Frankenstein hybrids that mix materials and styles in a way that would even give a cartoonish post-modernist like Michael Graves pause.

I wrote about this phenomenon in an article for Architecture Digest last year. (The original piece was about the new campus for China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. That’s a pretty interesting architectural spectacle in itself. Click here to see some beautiful photos of the campus by very friend Iwan Baan.)

To fully appreciate Wang Shu’s new campus for the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, it’s useful to travel to the city by bus. For much of the trip, your view is dominated by the unindustrialized agriculture that occupies so much of the Chinese countryside. You will see very little nature, and a great deal of mud, divided into tiny, meticulously parceled plots, some of which extend to within centimeters of the expressway. Small clusters of buildings appear every few hundred meters. They are mostly constructed of locally-produced brick and mirror the ruddy brownness of the earth from which they came, giving the scene a tranquilizing color consistency.

As you get nearer to the city, things begin to change. The foreground of farm life is compressed by a backdrop of cooling towers and smoke stacks. The air perceptibly grays. The images of rustic toil - elderly women bent over rice fields, teens transporting pigs by motorcycle, middle aged men hauling hay bales… - assume an ominous aura. There are glints of promise in the gloom, though. As if to compensate for the worsening atmosphere, the living conditions noticeably improve. The houses look sturdier, many are covered in a protective layer of plaster, some have multiple floors. An exceptional few are covered in rectangular tiles of white, pink, or lime green. Against the dreary surroundings, these unexpected bursts of color appear almost fluorescent.

As you approach the city limits, the proximity of money and opportunity grows more apparent and the decorative flourishes more dramatic. Colored tiles become commonplace. All houses now have glass windows and some are tinted blue. A few megastructures - a convention center, a long distance bus depot, one or two under-construction, already-populated housing complexes - mark the transition from rural to urban. They raise the bar for ornamentation and initiate an open competition of architectural showmanship which quickly drowns out the landscape.

The homes of the most affluent farmers - many of whom now work in the city as builders or businessmen - shoot up to three or four stories. Though the basic plan remains the same, the houses suddenly sprout absurd additions - Greek columns, Dutch gables, emerald curtain wall from an office building, granite stairs from a hotel. On nearly every corner sit mounds of broken bricks covered in a thin layer of white dust like loaves of ciabatta bread. Now that everyone can afford tiles, their size, color, and arrangement becomes the focus. Some use tiny, multi-colored squares to create a kind of pixelated static; others create simple, bold gestures like candy cane swirls; others eschew tiles altogether and create elaborate patterns of alternating vertical and horizontal brick. The result is the architectural equivalent of a car show. Riding past feels like being lost in gingerbread land.