On the Fuchun River, the Government Brought In Designers to Rebuild Half a Village. What Are These "Model Homes" For?

Homes for villagers? Guesthouses for tourists? Whatever they turn out to be, the government believes they will bring this small place talk and visitors.

To see what a "modern retro Zhejiang house" looks like, drive an hour southwest from central Hangzhou.

A village called Dongziguan has put up a cluster of new houses that follow the old layout — broad courtyards, high walls, herringbone rooflines. They look clean and spare, like "old houses" no time has passed over.

The Hangzhou city government convened the designers for this new project. The houses partly recreate building styles from the Ming and Qing dynasties or earlier, though no one agrees on who will live in them: elderly villagers, or curious outsiders. Late last year the government's planning department gave its First Prize for Excellent Provincial Urban and Rural Planning and Design to gad, the firm that designed them.

Like most villages in southern China, Dongziguan is ordinary. It has no fiscal revenue worth mentioning, and most of the jobs come from a single water plant. The village government maintains a few unremarkable attractions: several houses from the late Qing, and a newly built village history museum. Young people have left in large numbers. Those who stay farm the few mu of land not yet requisitioned, go along with the new waste and wastewater rules, and buy modest pension insurance. When the weather turns bad, villagers in dilapidated houses know they will be moved to temporary quarters.

The villagers' own houses are much the same as one another. Red brick, pointed roofs, Roman columns — some European, some Ming-and-Qing — usually lined up in a row, bright in color. Anyone who has taken a train through Jiangsu and Zhejiang has seen them. Planners now think there is not a trace of beauty in them. Villagers see nothing wrong: the first people here to get rich all built houses like these, and they stand for "a good life."

The new houses, which look like ink-wash paintings, began appearing slowly in the southwest corner of Dongziguan two years ago, and the village split into two halves that look nothing alike. The new ones could be a resort some over-eager developer sketched out on a whim, unconnected to the rest of the village. Villagers complain that they are neither one thing nor the other, and above all that they cannot work out what the ring of cobblestone paving outside each front door is for.

The government's plan sounds lovely: with the new houses and a steady run of preferential rural policies, this village of fewer than 2,000 permanent residents could grow rich again. The Fuchun River runs along its northern edge, and the place was once a modestly well-known landing dock. The government believes the new houses will bring talk and visitors.

Last autumn people began trickling in. They came holding cameras, or stood flying drones overhead, and left saying that these white-walled, black-tiled buildings carried a faint echo of Wu Guanzhong's landscape technique. One photography enthusiast who drove over from Hangzhou's Fuyang district said he badly wanted a house like this; it was his second trip in six months just to look at them.

Building the Houses

The architecture firm gad now thinks the project matters a great deal too. But the designer who led it had taken it for "just an ordinary job," and changed his mind only when he went back to the village the other day and found it packed with parked cars.

gad wanted the work credited to the team, so it asked QDaily not to name the lead designer.

Dongziguan was gad's first rural project, and the firm started it with the appetite of people doing something new. In 2014, invited to survey the site, the designer came away excited and wrote on social media that the village had "everything — waterways, old camphor trees, old houses" and "urgently needed reviving."

But the architects soon saw how little room they had. As in urban development, this was an assigned essay: gad got a 25-mu plot (about 16,666 square meters), and its direct client, the Dongziguan village government, wanted 47 houses on it. The number had been counted carefully. The 47 households included families displaced by the village's own planning and families officially classed as having housing difficulties. Under the rules for rural resettlement housing, each house had a ground footprint of roughly 120 square meters.

Beyond that, the designer said, no further instructions came from the authorities.

The designer, in his thirties, says his "values point toward the future." He studied architecture at Nanjing University under Zhang Lei, who founded the university's Center for Sustainable Vernacular Architecture — and then joined gad after graduating. The firm began life as the Greentown Design Institute and has worked extensively with the developer Greentown Group. gad was not among the first design firms into the countryside. When it took this project in 2014, most of its people spent their days designing high-end urban housing that sold for 30,000 to 100,000 yuan per square meter.

A good share of gad's earlier work was traditional Chinese courtyard housing, full of the signature courtyards, lattice windows and upturned eaves. Over the past few years, wealthy and middle-class city dwellers have arrived, as if by unspoken agreement, at a traditional Eastern taste in houses and furnishings. gad saw "demand erupting," took hold of it, and grew into a design group of 850 people.

The villagers were not ready for any of this. Normally, handed the right to build for themselves, they can put up a three-story detached house in a few months. That is also the usual way with rural resettlement housing: villagers decide more, and move faster and more firmly. The autonomy is worth a lot, so they do not usually agonize over anything as small as style; at worst they can consult the official General Atlas of Designs for New Rural Housing (《新农村住宅设计通用图集》). Such a house rarely costs more than 200,000 to 300,000 yuan to build.

"The important point we seized on was that it's cheap," the designer said. So this practical firm gave up traditional materials and craft altogether and used contemporary materials and contemporary structures — which in turn produced an effect of its own: "abstracting the spirit of tradition by contemporary means." Luo Zhigang, assistant director of the Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute, said of the new buildings at Dongziguan: "It's innovation with a fair amount of 'Chinese flavor.'"

The cost came to 1,376 yuan per square meter, less than a tenth of what gad's usual projects run. A single house costs not much more than 400,000 yuan. According to village party secretary Xu Shixin, the Hangzhou city government also put in more than 10 million yuan of subsidy for supporting works: electrical and internet cable, gas and water pipe, and also the landscaping, roads and planting outside the houses, and the clean-up of Xibiantang pond in the old part of the village.

Beyond that, this firm, used to dealing with urban clients, believes it brought the village something extra and new. Over two years the project lead may have gone out there more than 80 times, and on two of those visits he held discussion sessions with a few villagers. A questionnaire of more than a dozen questions was handed to the future owners.

"If I hadn't proposed it, how would the village ever have had such a thing? But this is how I work on any project. So I had them arrange it — I wanted to meet the villagers. They're my end users," the designer said. He did not trust the government to do it alone; officials would find it hard to "do it properly."

People With Opinions

But the questions the architects put together with such care may not have been what the "end users" cared about most. Judging by how few people ticked certain boxes, some of them could not picture what a question about a study or a computer room meant. Even after the sessions, several villagers — among them Fang Bingxin, owner of house No. 61 — said that when they saw the floor plans before construction began, "we thought the design wasn't very reasonable" and "we never expected it to be designed like this."

These users were not so easy to handle. At the very least, "the ideas didn't line up the way they do with people from the city."

It is not hard to explain. The countryside that actually exists was built in the turbulent twentieth century, not in the eighteenth or nineteenth that designers and the urban middle class wish to return to. Some villagers still call the village government the "brigade," and keep a portrait of Chairman Mao on the wall beside an inscription reading "existence is truth." A designer who set out to interview villagers first would most often be told: "What's the use of asking us? The government will build it however it decides to build it."

The gad designer remembers the discussion sessions as very quiet; almost no one asked anything.

Before the houses were finished, the village government held a lottery to decide which house went to whom, so as to look fair. After that, the designer said, owners turned up at the site from time to time. Compared with a discussion session, a building site was an environment the villagers knew, and they hoped to take part in building their own houses and offer a few opinions, as they normally would. But in a government-led, comprehensively planned project, once the drawings are fixed — especially drawings that have already been through a consultation process — such opinions are not easily taken up.

Persuading the owners was not easy either, and usually took outside force. Fang Bingxin's son, a businessman who moved to the county seat in 2004, talked his 70-year-old father round: "Just do it the way they say." Most of the time there was no young mediator at hand, and the firm had to turn to the government instead: "Once the government gets tough, they're still a bit afraid of it."

The one time the architects lost ground was the argument over wall height. However hard the designer explained the tradition of "tall houses and deep courtyards," the villagers would not buy it; many of them had no idea where this so-called tradition came from. Several households insisted on dropping their walls by 60 centimeters, so they would look more like the garden in front of a European-style house, and block less light.

The disagreements did not end there. On the construction phase the designer was blunt: "We were very unsatisfied — the craft, the methods, all of it done by irresponsible people from the contractors." He added that this was also bound up with the "lowest bid wins" system in construction, which saves budget but cannot guarantee good work.

After a scattered few villagers moved in, the party secretary began telling every visitor to go and look at house No. 61. Its interior also follows a traditional style: all the furniture is imitation rosewood, and the modern marble and appliances are kept to dark tones that sit well with the outside of the building. The owner says the fit-out cost 700,000 to 800,000 yuan.

The secretary thinks it makes a fine example. The noticeboard in the village committee building states the first duty of village cadres: enrich the people, strengthen the village.

The owner of the house complains that "then all sorts of people started turning up," and says he does not enjoy being a model held up by the cadres. "It's just an ordinary house, really. Nothing worth talking about." That morning he had received an online outlet and a television crew. At lunch he had a drink, and used the drink as an excuse to turn away several reporters who had driven out.

Timing

"Ordinary people always think about their own interests," said village party secretary Xu Shixin. He is not yet 40, in a suit, with a mechanical watch on his wrist and pomade in his hair, sitting in an office lined with inscribed plaques.

Xu understood this before the village built anything. He handled the demolition of old houses along the river and near the village center, and considers it the hardest part of rural work. After that he applied to the Hangzhou city government for a "Hangzhou-style housing" pilot and a 10-million-yuan grant. Because it required villagers to give up the right to build for themselves, this was harder still. He had to persuade them all over again to leave the building of their houses to the village government — one designer, one construction team, for everyone.

Xu now regards the finished "Hangzhou-style houses" as the most important thing he has done in three years in office. Before that he worked on cleaning up the banks of the Fuchun River and on waste and wastewater treatment, which may have brought a few picnickers to the water but made no great difference.

The "Hangzhou-style housing" project has drawn officials from other provinces and cities, and officials from the levels directly above — and that is a difference in kind. "When leaders from all sides come, they give money. Funding comes down from every level," the designer said, stating it plainly, though he says politics does not interest him.

Most designers working in the countryside know this well. Once a village shows signs of life, private capital rushes in; where there is no trace of revival yet, the government is probably the most decisive backer. The clearest example is Wang Shu. The Pritzker Prize winner redesigned 24 villagers' houses in Wencun, a village in another of Hangzhou's outlying counties.

Wang Shu has said on more than one occasion that the project came out of a negotiation with the Fuyang district government, which administers Wencun. He recounts his own line from that bargaining: "Unless you let me rebuild Wencun, I won't take the design of the Fuyang Three Museums." The "Fuyang Three Museums" — the district's art museum, museum and archive — was a government-led, large public building project covering 69 mu and costing around 500 million yuan.

Wang Shu is not a designer thrown up by the rural-building fashion; he cared about tradition and local particularity from the start. Some also think his Pritzker Prize in 2014 indirectly pushed designers to turn part of their attention to the countryside, because the award affirmed his regard for tradition rather than simple advocacy of modernization. In Wencun he used local traditional materials: Hangzhou gray stone, yellow clay and moso bamboo. None of those materials or structures has anything to do with the traditional Chinese architecture so admired now.

Most likely out of regard for Wang Shu's influence, Wencun was also listed as the most important of a series of Hangzhou housing renovation projects. Today it no longer looks like a story people enjoy telling: nothing lasting has come of it since. Some people in Dongziguan, including visitors who come to study the place, put that down to how hard Wencun is to reach. Others think that, next to Dongziguan's white walls, black tiles and herringbone gables, Wang Shu's buildings are "too experimental" — not friendly enough to look at, so that neither villagers nor city visitors could connect with them.

These views give away something else: it is hard to pin the hope of changing a village entirely on one architect or one design firm — above all on experimental approaches, where the odds of success are so poor that even officials are not sure it can be done.

Liu Yuyang, an architect based in Shanghai, started a rural design scheme in 2014 with several influential independent designers from the Yangtze River Delta, choosing Zhangwu, a town in Anji, Zhejiang. The village official then in post was very keen on the idea: she approached Liu Yuyang herself, offered eight sites along the old street for renovation, and accepted the designers' combined budget of 3 million yuan.

That was early in the rural-building boom. Designers found that the freedom and the low budgets of village projects let them step outside convention and try things — Liu Yuyang's pavilion design was later used on a project on the outskirts of Shanghai, and another architect, Zhang Jiajing, applied an odd circular perforated structure to his project at the West Bund Museum.

But the designers also found the officials hesitant. Officials understood a comprehensively planned development like Wuzhen's better, and had little faith in the lasting effect of renovating houses piece by piece. That rare official so keen on design finished her term six months later, and the Zhangwu project never happened.

Today even the slowest design firms and individuals can see that steady, unchanging policy support has made the moment for going into the countryside riper and riper. A survey the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released last April found that half the rural population does not want to move to the city. Whether that is a cause or an effect is hard to say. What is clear is that the government is using simplified company registration, lower taxes and easier terms for investment to steer people away from the big cities.

As for this movement against the direction of urbanization, some trace it back to the previous central government's "building a new countryside"; others think these fast-rising new rural buildings are local officials' reading of a romantic phrase from President Xi Jinping, who had earlier stressed "nostalgia for home."

"A Good Idea"

Xu Shixin's way of working does show that rural officials' understanding of the whole business is changing. They have begun to hold views like this one: what puts city people off the countryside most is hardship, and the absence of beauty.

"Taking the Hangzhou-style houses as our opening, we have to get the facades of the houses around them right too — it's about the village's face as well," Xu Shixin said.

At the village entrance he had eight characters carved into a large rock: "Beautiful China, Design Leads the Way," signed Yu Dafu. But as with most inscriptions in China attributed to famous people rather than to calligraphers, Xu Shixin pieced those eight characters together himself from several of Yu Dafu's manuscripts. The writer came here in 1932 to convalesce and wrote an essay called 《东梓关》 ("Dongziguan").

Xu Shixin means to use architecture to build up the village's tourist trade. In pure economic terms, no village really wants day-trippers; they do not spend enough. At a 2016 performance-report meeting Xu said his new plans also included a second phase of new rural houses in 2017, a visitor center, a parking lot, and commercial investment to build restaurants and guesthouses along the Fuchun River.

Last September, when the facades of the new cluster were broadly finished, the village started building a community activity room just south of them, due to be finished this summer. Its design is not settled yet, but the walls will use the cobblestone gad originally had in mind.

Architects generally agree that this kind of whole-village planning is what actually revives a place. On Saturday, Liu Yuyang presented the three-year-old Zhangwu project to more than a dozen architecture students from the University of Hong Kong, and afterward said he thought the original villagers probably could not carry such plans through on their own. "It also has to include former country people who left, lived in the city for a while and came back... and city people who grew up in cities from childhood."

Fang Bingxin's grandson, Fang Yitian, fits planners' hopes for the young urban returnee. In 2006, like most people who left Dongziguan, he moved "into town in Fuyang," coming back only for the Lunar New Year. But since the village's new houses became a hit online, and friends kept asking "isn't that your family's place?", Fang Yitian has changed his WeChat Moments cover photo to an outline drawing of them.

A few days earlier he gave an interview to a Zhejiang television station in the village, admitting that he is thinking about coming back to make a career here. The 21-year-old later explained to us that this was not something made up on the spot for the camera: he really had talked it over seriously with his father. Tourists will increase year by year; a small shop would be a good idea. Xu Shixin says that when young people came home for New Year this year, some looked at the new houses in excitement and said much the same thing to him: "Secretary, are there any good spots? We want to come back and start something."

Xu Shixin was also one of those who left the village early, when he was young. In 1999 he went to Yiwu, first as a cook, later going into Fuyang's traditional paper business. When he came back in 2008, he knew that "once you're back, you're certainly not getting out again." He joined the Party, was elected to the village committee, bought property in both Fuyang district and Dongziguan, and also runs a sand-and-gravel building materials plant. He is careful to say that with all the construction going on in the village, his own company has never taken part in any of it.

But however detailed a plan is, force majeure can change it at any time. Xu Shixin is not confident he can win a subsidy from the Hangzhou city government for the second phase of housing, so he has also filed applications for National Historical and Cultural Village and National Civilized Village status. "This isn't a matter of a little money, it's a matter of a lot of money," Xu said; it is what worries him most as he thinks about the projects to come.

Villagers have also been moving into the finished houses more slowly than expected. If fewer than half the families are in by the end of this year, visitors will start to wonder too: why don't the villagers want to live in these beautiful houses?

No one has a simple answer. At the end of 2016, Zhu Dangqi, the newly appointed party secretary of Fuyang district, made a fairly radical suggestion to Xu Shixin in Dongziguan: "Just have the village take them all back and turn them into guesthouses."

Since then the ideas of "housing" and "guesthouse" have been tangled together. The government seems to have something of the sort in mind: a government report titled 《浙江省美丽乡村建设行动计划》 (Zhejiang Province Beautiful Countryside Action Plan) assigns Fuyang district to build "Hangzhou-style housing" and to take the "boutique route" at the same time. "Boutique" is a word used in the hotel business, and especially in the guesthouse trade.

"That isn't realistic," Xu Shixin said in the interview. "Once people's old houses are pulled down they have to live somewhere. You can't give the place you live in to someone else." Whether he has said the same thing to the district government is another matter.

But if the government really does intend to pilot guesthouses in these houses, it will probably not be difficult. Setting aside the authority that makes villagers "a bit afraid," some of them are already troubled by empty rooms. Most of the new houses were designed with four or five bedrooms, which matches the picture people hold of several generations living under one rural roof. In fact that happens in only a few families; work migration to the cities, and everything that has come with it, has thoroughly changed the structure of rural families, and even over the New Year holiday the rooms are not necessarily all full.

Villagers have come round quickly to a new way of thinking as well, realizing the houses may be worth a good deal. Several who have already moved in said that although they thought the new houses ugly at first, more and more people have come to look and all of them say the houses are good — so now they find them "not bad to look at, actually."

Xu Shixin says he is considering renting houses from some villagers: "One block, make it guesthouses, ten houses, eight, seven houses." But he did not seem sure he was ready to discuss the details of any guesthouse plan.