4 friends went to a poor village in Guizhou, built 10 huts and witnessed the rebirth of a village.

"There are no direct highways, there are not many sightseeing spots, how to make a once poor village have a new life?

Walking along the countryside of Unity Village in Guizhou, the fallow team pondered the possibilities.

The mountains of Tuanjie Village

A natural platform halfway up the mountain

Tuanjie Village, a poverty-stricken village in the mountains of Guizhou just a few years ago, is surrounded by a wild and quiet natural environment. It doesn't have much of a humanistic vein to inherit, but it has big mountains, rivers, and retains the flavor of pristine nature.

When the architects from Shanghai first climbed up to the platform halfway up the mountain, they were impressed by the scenery:

"When you walk to the edge of the platform, the presence of nature becomes so strong. The mountains surround you in all directions, and the sounds of birds chirping, insects chirping, and the wind suddenly come at you. There are only mountains in front of you, and when you are looking at them, they are looking at you."

They wanted to leave the feeling of this moment in the space of the building and convey it to more people who come to the village.

Visitor Center in the Clouds

Chalet Hotel on a Rocky Slope

In six months, with the owners and architects ****ing together, Unity Village has built a rich agritourism base that includes 10 chalets in a fallow design, as well as a restaurant, a bar, and a visitor center.

In the past, young people from the village went to the city to work; now, people from the city come to the village to eat, drink tea, and experience farming.

The village not only has more jobs, but also has specialized staff to help sell the agricultural products, doubling the income of families, and getting extra dividends at the end of each year.

Overlooking Unity Village

People in the city may even spend an afternoon in the village's exhibition hall, dedicated to studying the history of the village:

How did a village that was once extremely poor come to life?

Shen Hongliang (right) and the owner's on-site staff visit villagers' homes

In October 2017, the fallow team came to Unity Village for the first time.

In the eyes of the village elders, these young people from Shanghai: they can't get used to eating chili peppers, they don't understand the dialect, they can build beautiful houses, and they are "foreign" city people.

They have positioned themselves as a team that must be "grounded" and must think about how to find the same language as the village in a different context, to capture the balance.

The designers in the fallow field: from left to right, Shen Hongliang, Tsai Yuying, and Chen Xuanru

As architects, their professional lives have also undergone a regrouping.

Ten years ago, they all worked at Shin Isozaki's Shanghai studio. Shin Isozaki is an icon of Japanese metabolism, designing a series of Japan's iconic cultural buildings. The old man's studio in Shanghai also upholds a consistently rigorous and fast-paced way of working.

During the years they worked in the master's studio, the intensive and high-intensity work allowed them to accumulate a wealth of project experience, as well as lay the foundation for understanding the entire field of architecture, and gradually came to the decision that they wanted to go their own way.

Fallow Farming Architecture's studio on Urumqi Road

In the spring of 2017, they decided to open a studio together - named 'Fallow Farming'.

They rented a small 80- to 90-square-foot courtyard in a lane in Shanghai's French Concession, where they tried to find a sense of work-life balance and slow down the pace of their work as much as possible.

Everyday life on Shanghai's Urumqi Road

Shen Hongliang says he loves the environment around the courtyard:

"You can walk out of the alleyway, and you'll see a big Shanghainese woman chilling under the sycamore tree, or you'll meet a Netflix star on the street, or you'll walk past a fried dough bar and baked cake store, and then you'll see an exquisitely renovated vintage café. All kinds of people converge here!

He likes to look for design inspiration from these fireworks.

The work of the fallow team - strange and quiet architecture

Mushroom Tree House (left) and Seed Tree House (right) at Fairy Lake, Jiangxi

In terms of architectural design, they also uphold the same philosophy as in life: "The so-called fallow is not to let the land go barren, but to let the tired land rest and regain nutrients and fertility. restore nutrients and fertility."

They emphasized the need for buildings to have room to breathe, and for the design process to reflect on how the power of design can be appropriate: "Sometimes the glamour is not as good as the space that is introverted and rugged, and sometimes the architecture that looks strange can also be quiet and live with the environment***".

The Tuanjie Village complex is a gentle attempt to integrate architecture into nature, and to disappear into nature.

The water channels on the cliffs of Tuanjie Village

Tuanjie Village is located in the hinterland of a large mountain, with high mountains and steep rocks, so the land can't store water and grow rice. The villagers could only grind up the drought-resistant rice and steam it every day as their staple food.

Later, Huang Dafa, the village chief who grew up eating the rice of Unity Village, spent 36 years leading the villagers to cut a 9.4-kilometer "sky canal" on the wall with steel brazes, hammers, and hoes.

Huang Dafa was 58 years old when he built this aqueduct

He still led the villagers to hang a rope on the cliff to measure the water

The "Sky Nullah", which bypassed three major mountains, passed through three cliffs, and three dangerous cliffs, finally introduced water of the Screw River, which was a few kilometers away, into the village. The root of poverty, the lack of water, has been removed from Unity Village.

Huang Dafa is known as the "contemporary fool". The villagers also named the canal "Dafa Canal".

Huang Dafa, the village chief who was known as the "modern-day Yugong,"

still lives here, guarding the aqueduct that he was willing to pay for with his life

A villager who was involved in the construction of the aqueduct said that when the clear water of the aqueduct flowed into the drought-stricken slopes, Huang Dafa quietly hid in a corner of a house and said, "We're not sure if we can do this. Huang Dafa quietly hid in a corner, tears could not stop falling down.

Villagers who came to participate in the site construction

But growing food is not enough to make young people willing to return to the village, but also to have economic income and jobs.

So the fallow team that was commissioned to come to Guizhou from Shanghai became the second batch of people to "reclaim" the land.

For them, Unity Village is a special project. Not only is there a touching story of the aqueduct here, but there are also many villagers who need to rely on their buildings to improve their lives.

Steep rocky slopes

The difficulties of the construction were obvious: the base of the chalet was located halfway up the mountain, and the path was steep, so all the building materials had to be carried up the mountain by hand. They could only try to use local materials, reduce the size of glass and other materials, and minimize transportation costs.

And construction in the countryside has 'surprises' every day, with design drawings often needing to be readjusted according to site conditions. Coupled with the fact that the construction period was only a few months away, the fallow team stayed at the nearest county farmhouse to the site.

Just this "nearest" farmhouse to the site, still have to drive nearly 40 minutes around the mountain road to reach. After more than 3 months on site, they tried to control every design change as much as possible.

Stone walls in the village

In terms of architectural form, there is no classic form of building in Unity Village. The old houses used to be built from the most abundant woolen stones and timber in the area.

Since the 1990s, the village has seen the emergence of low-cost, fast construction period of concrete frame houses. The old stone houses became less and less.

Diagram of the construction process

The fallow team decided to follow the traditional local building materials, such as woolen stone and wood, to materially perpetuate the history of the village:

"I hope that decades from now, our building will still be a special existence: perhaps the function has changed, but it can still live as a museum, carrying a little memory of the village."

In September 2018, the Chalet Hotel, Guizhou Dafa Tianqu Visitor Center, Mountain Restaurant and Bar were completed.

In order to minimize the impact of the building on the environment, the Chalet Hotel all adopts a picket-height steel platform as its base. The high ceilings also minimize the impact of the humid and foggy local climate on the living spaces.

Chalet Hotel

The average size of each chalet varies from 40-50 sizes. In order to meet the fast construction cycle, the building forms were chosen to be the simplest geometric forms.

The exterior walls of the chalets are made of dark-colored hardwood. This material withstands the weather and the elements, and the textured dark color blends naturally with the original form of the site.

Each cabin is not far from the other, but the views have been carefully considered to ensure that each one looks out over the mountains without disturbing the other.

The balconies are built-in, allowing for easy viewing and privacy.

Mountain Restaurant and Bar

The restaurant and bar also follow the terrain, with an elevated structure at the bottom, making it a single-story building with a difference in height.

The lower restaurant is set forward to embrace the mountain view as much as possible, while the higher bar is connected by a staircase, creating a transition of light and dark in the flow of the space.

In designing the restaurant, the fallow team wanted to bring the mountain views inside while adding a bit of spatial expression, allowing the building to respond to the site's light, and to moments of climate change.

They used floor-to-ceiling slatted louvers, which allow the windows to be fully open to take in the endless greenery, or closed to allow sunlight to pour in through the louvers, creating different light and shadow effects at different times of day and in different weather.

Sitting in the restaurant, what you can see is not only the natural mountain view, the furry stone landscape, but also the farmland where you can pick for parents and children, and the creek where you can touch the fish. While you are looking at the people down the mountain, the people down the mountain are also treating the restaurant and bar as scenery.

Dafa Tianqu Visitor Center

In addition to the chalet hotels and restaurants and bars, there is also the Dafa Tianqu Visitor Center, which is named after the water canal in the village.

As the largest public **** building in the village, the Visitor Center serves as a reception center for tourists, an office for operations, a countryside exhibition hall, and a recreational square for villagers.

The visitor center is also built on the mountain, using a stepped roof to reduce the oppression of the building on the environment, but also with the terraced landscape in the mountains to form an echo.

The lower you go, the larger the span of the building; forming a narrower and wider architectural form.

Reception space

Office area

Exhibition hall

The total area of the whole visitor center is 3280. In addition to the internal space for the operation of the office area, the reception area for visitors, a part of the space has been set aside for the exhibition hall.

The historical face of the village, the story of the village secretary leading the villagers to spend 36 years to excavate the aqueduct, and the process of poverty alleviation of the agro-tourism company ------ are all written in the history book of the exhibition hall.

Stepped Roof

The stepped roof is a square and a stage. It serves as the new community center for the whole village: it is a place where you can look at the mountains and the water, where festive performances can be held, or which is usually used for walks and chats.

The entire facade of the building is a clear dark stone, a burr stone common to traditional residential compounds in the neighborhood, echoing the architectural elements of the native village.

The dark color is easy to blend with the environment, and it is difficult to shoot a "Netflix blockbuster". However, they are more concerned about whether the users of the building feel comfortable, and whether it blends in with the environment, than they are about the Netflix. Does it blend in with the environment? And can the building activate the memory of the people living in this land?

And so it is, as the reborn Unicity Village continues to attract tourists from the surrounding urban areas.

When city dwellers ask villagers where to go in the village, they can naturally say, "Go sit on the roof!

After the houses were built, the story of the village was just beginning!

Unlike ordinary poverty alleviation projects, Unity Village, in addition to drastic infrastructure renovation, also practiced the principle of "teaching people to fish" as a follow-up poverty alleviation mechanism.

Visitor center office area

Villagers not only join the construction team in the early stage to get paid for their labor, but also the subsequent operation of the hotel, restaurant, bar, and visitor center can provide long-term employment for young people.

Many young people who worked in Zunyi and Guiyang have returned to their hometowns, and after systematic training, they have been employed.

For villagers engaged in traditional agricultural labor, the owners have set up a professional agricultural company to guide them in planting organic vegetables, crab rice, rapeseed oil, Chinese bees and Qianbei black pigs.

The four main agricultural products under the brand "Pig, Bee, Rice and Oil" are sold to the stores in the city. The villagers can use their land or labor to invest in the shares, and at the end of the year, they can get additional dividends from the hotel and other tourism projects.

There's a lot of new news coming out of Unity Village: a music festival is being held on the rooftop plaza today, and in a few days there's going to be a cultural fair in the village, and so on, and the community is full of energy.

Young people are coming back, household incomes have doubled, and the village is becoming more and more vibrant. Even the highway to Unity Village will open next spring.

By then, I believe that people from places farther away from this small village will also come to Unity Village, sit on the roof of the small square, look at the clouds and mist, listen to the bird cries and the wind, and feel a sense of security wrapped in layers of mountains!

Thanks to Shukong Architecture for the interview and materials

Photographs: Laurian Ghinitoiu, Tian Fangfang, Lekong Sweet, ZJJZ

Part of the picture is from the internet, copyright belongs to the original authors

Address: Unity Village, Zunyi Zhuangzhou District, Guizhou

Owner: Guizhou Dafa Tourism Development Co.

Creator and design team: Cao Zhenyu, Chen Xuanru, Shen Hongliang, Cai Yuying

Reproduced from "Borrowed Accommodation"

The project is a new project of the Dafa Tourism Development Company in Guizhou.