The NUDGING VERNACULARS studio starts with a question......... how might we as designers operate within a mode of practice counter to the currently dominant “Starchitect” model. Rather than inserting unique, distinct signature objects into the world, might we as designers approach sites and situations in a way that might operate more under the radar by carefully understanding existing vernaculars and finding ways to intervene and nudge them toward new potentials?
The NUDGING VERNACULARS studio starts with the premise that the urban and rural are intricately intertwined and interdependent and that there is a physical, social, environmental and economic continuum of space running between them.
This studio will study and intervene in two different but interconnected zones of habitation- Beijing’s Urban Villages and Rural Villages -to design proposals for new forms of habitation that respond to the existing and often extreme conditions of these rapidly changing environments.
China’s Urban Villages are informal settlements that house both the original residents of these urban agrarian environments as well as rural to urban migrants. Because the rural urban migrants are living illegally in the city, the government makes no provision to house them. The native urban villagers have taken entrepreneurial advantage of this situation and built housing that might be called “housing by the people, for the people”.
China’s Rural Villages and countryside might be the most endangered human habitat that has ever faced humankind. This habitat has become vulnerable and unstable due to the massive social, environmental and economic changes in China’s recent history, not least of which is massive urbanisation. And yet, one of every ten people on earth live in a rural Chinese village, and they are 10% of the other 90%. If rural environments continue to be abandoned at the rate that they are today, the massive urbanisation trend will only become heightened [as the equivalent of all of the cities in America will need to be constructed from scratch in the next
ten to twenty years] and it will surely lead to a scenario of “whiz bang quick cities” with “tofu” construction and other problematics. Conversely, rural ways of life remain the most sustainable ones- for instance, rural residents use 1/10th the amount of water that urban residents do.
