After School

Students：Yiwen Zhou、Yanyu Chen、Ling Ma、Zekun Zhao
Project ：After School
Tutors ：Zhaohui Yuan
School ：Chalmers University of Technology、Hunan University

Main Focus

Chinese young migrant workers progressively increase annually but with the pressure from their own economic conditions and social systems migrant workers can not afford to bring the kids into the city. The number of rural children left behind is increasing rapidly. The condition is that in every four rural children there will be more than one left-behind child. These children lack the care and love from their parents, being prone to abnormal development of values and psychological deviation. In June 2015, four left-behind children in Bijie commited suicide together by drinking pesticide. Childhood should not be so desperate. How to avoid psychological problems of the left-behind children and forster their healthy personalities become our campus architectural design focus.

Research Perspective:

Research into left-behind children shows that material poverty and lack of psychological guidance from their parents are the primary cause of psychological problems. While the situation that young adults continue to go out for work will not be improved for a while, how to encourage left-behind children to positively help themselves has become the focus of our research.

Site

In the mountains located in the northernmost part of Longhui County, Hunan Province there are a group of more than 5,000 people, who are a branch of the Yao Nationality. They inherit their ancestor's lifestyle and "cross-stitch" handicrafts and are dressed in brightly colored ethnic costumes. They have a beautiful name - "Huayao."

With the acceleration of urbanization process, young adults leave the village searching for higher income while the elderly and children are left to accompany each othet. This trend not only leads to the loss of labor force, which is crusial for local honeysuckle industry, but also weakens the safety of the elderly and children as vulnerable groups. At the same time,the local primary school just has two classrooms inside with a lack of activity facilities. The connection between school and family is relatively weak also. It is not a qualified educational institution for developing the comprehensive ability of students.

We analyse Datuo village from the landscape, the crowd and the activities aspects. Aerial figure shows that the spatial structure of the villages is dominated by landscape. The Huayao people love honeysuckle and in the harvest season every hill and dale are covered by gold. Datuo village is located on the hillside with stone waterfall as the background.The villagers plough and sow conform according to the trend of mountain, forming a unique terraced landscape. Spring is the main source of irrigation with the locally produced bamboo acting as conduit. But because the stone waterfall reduced the water storage capacity of the mountain,the villagers have to import water from neighboring villages,which causing inconvenience.

Huayao's traditional wooden house are scattered conforming to terrain with the most vibrant locations centralized around major transportation nodes. It results in some marginal space.

The daily activities of the villagers are mainly labor, chat or traditional handicraft, relatively simple.The huge rocks in various shapes are unique and important places for public activities. Children like to climb and play on the stones while adults rest and chat around them or use the surfaces to dry honeysuckle。 The stones are not only the distinctive landscape but also functional areas closely related to villagers' life.

Villagers who are relatives tend to live nearby but labor independently.