When an old man passes away, the spirit will stop in the hall, and the number of days will be calculated by the Feng Shui master according to the eight characters of the birth date, and the whole village will come to help organize, wash and cook, and receive guests and so on. Although young people's weddings are becoming more and more "foreign" as a result of urbanization, and are generally no longer held in the home, the funeral ceremonies of the elderly still continue to be "traditional". In the Chinese countryside, weddings and celebrations are an important link in local social relations. The hall is a ceremonial space in traditional houses, used for honoring ancestors and gods, worshiping heaven and earth, and celebrating weddings, funerals, and birthdays. Before the renovation, the old house had a hall and a wing, except for the hall, the first floor of the wing housed the elders, and the second floor was the children's bedroom, which was the most adaptable building prototype in the 1980s to the local customs and habits. ![]() The need to consider a place to organize the afterlife of the elderly after their passing away, which was even the only requirement in the design brief, distinguishes Peng’s Mansion from villas or B&Bs in terms of typology. Peng's family's "return to the field", a building made up of sections on the top, bottom, left and right, the result of some kind of changing heterogeneous mix of urban and rural areas, which, although it looks similar to the old house, is completely different from the old one.Ĭountryside - the hall and the compartments. Peng’s father could still play mahjong with his neighbors, and everything was as it was in the old days, except for the loss of the roof and the enclosure. The annexed bungalow, which was originally intended to be a mahjong room, was continued in the form of a grape arbor, where Mr. With the loss of the small attached bungalow, the Peng’s House became cooler in the atmosphere, and eventually, we had to accept this slightly lonely house. By a stroke of luck, the main building was eventually renovated after two sections were put together. However, reports and quarrels still came as expected, and in the end, the original chicken coop and firewood house could not be saved after many rounds of efforts, neither photos nor remote sensing images proved that it had ever existed. Prior to the start of the construction, the owner was very confident that everything would go smoothly, as not only some of the neighbors in the village are related to each other, but also the families were greeted from door to door. Along with the process of fragmentation of the rural society, the relationship between the neighbors of the village has gradually become delicate, with two threads of interest and kinship dominating the loosening of the social network at the same time. This is a challenging design, neither the city people's attachment to elegance, nor the rural people's modern improvement, but the need to complete a comfortable daily space for three generations of urban and rural people within a framework full of limitations.ĭespite the fact that everything was in accordance with the rules and procedures, our architect friends with extensive experience in rural construction reminded us to renovate the building by "half demolition and half construction", which not only implies an increase in the difficulty and cost of construction but also actually affects the logic of generating the program - starting from the profile. The old house to be renovated was constructed in the 1980s as a standard rural building, a simple standard rural building which, due to its affordability, influenced the countryside of that era in the north and south of the Yangtze River. ![]() Qidong's rural construction regulations are strict, requiring that the renovation of the Peng’s residence is completed within the original contours (90 square meters of base area) and that the appearance should match that of the original "matchbox". The new Peng residence needed to accommodate the different living habits of the two generations so that the rural and urban lifestyles could be blended and distinctly separated. ![]() Therefore, the renovation of this old house in the countryside of Qidong became an urgent matter. Peng, born in the 80s, decided to bring his wife and children back to his hometown to live with his parents. Text description provided by the architects.
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