China

When architect John Lin and his students from the University of Hong Kong first visited Shijia village in the province of Shaanxi, China, villagers had a list of requests for projects. But Lin wanted to create something that “empowered them to solve problems on their own,” he wrote in a statement. He and his students observed that rural Chinese villages were changing dramatically as people fled to urban centers. And urban ideas were making their way back to the villages: traditional mud houses were being torn down in favor of less economical and sustainable concrete and brick structures built by outsourced labor.

Lin—who, with Joshua Bolchover, founded the nonprofit research-and-design collaborative Rural Urban Framework at the university—worked with students to design a prototype for a vernacular village courtyard house, where three generations might live in a dense cluster of ad hoc additions. Lin's prototype “would be a model or reference,” he wrote, and was not meant to inspire exact replicas. The $53,400 project, constructed with villagers' input, serves as a reminder that modernization is possible with the skills and materials available locally.