Students: Zhang Yepeng, Li Xiang, Han Shilin
Tutors: Zheng Ying
Project: Village Reappearance
School: School of Architecture, Tianjin University

The story
The Three Gorges Project, where once the residents have been living generation after generation, is one of the greatest treasure-congregate places of Chinese culture.

With the launch of the project, countless cultural relics and historic sites are submerged deep in the river water. Simultaneously, a lot of villages are faced with the fate of being abandoned, losing the old-time vitality. A Dwellings Museum is devised located above the submerged dwellings relics, awaking the memory of the original form of the village, with imitating the typical feature of that. Residents who miss the bygone hometown will come to seek back yesterday’s move.

Project Background
The site of the museum is located at Bai Di, Fengjie country, Chongqing, the origin of the Three Gorges Project. In past time, Bai Di is a peninsula connected with the land. As a consequence of the rise of the water level, the connection part between Bai Di and the land is being submerged gradually, thus making Bai Di a lonely island. There was a village constructed according to the terrain at the part of the submerged, where our architecture will be built above the village and the water surface. It will reconnect Bai Di and the land, memorizing the origin village as a particular museum.

Concept
The most impressing thing of the origin village is its ruleless growth, seeming unordered but actually full of natural beauty, as it combined the environment and the requirement of human use. Following this feature, we refine the origin elements abstractly—remain the texture of the village and the roof of the houses and restructure the interior space. Visitors who come here will deeply experience the villagers’ living atmosphere before. All this makes our architecture itself become the highlight of the museum display.

The disappearance of Architectures
Disappearance is different from vanishment. Vanishment refers to the inexistence of body, while disappearance of architectures means the architecture dissolving into the local natural and social environment. The wild-grow villages dissolved into the local origin landscape entirely, but the form of it has disappeared on account of human activities. We make effort to copy the disappeared forms, presenting the disappearance of the architectures once more. It is the best explanation of the theme that the origin village was born and grew here, fusing into one with the primordial land.