Sustainability and monumentality: A deduction of tectonic culture within the context of contemporary rural village

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School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
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Date

2024-12-28

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Major/Subject

Architecture

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Degree programme

Master’s programme in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Architec

Language

en

Pages

70

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Abstract

This thesis aims to discuss the role of contemporary rural villages with historical significance, their relationship with the larger society and possibilities for future development. The background of the thesis is based on a real village in China facing a declining population and vitality loss, which is a representative situation among many isolated rural areas like this. The thesis starts with investigating the village and the theoretical research on regionalism and critical theory to form a guideline and principle for the regenerative project, then propose a design to demonstrate the strategy. The cities and villages are facing homologous problems today. More and more people are being dislocated from their homes to metropolises, leading to the rise of congestion and competition in those extremely concentrated areas, while more and more remote settlements are decaying and facing spectaclization. The people nowadays are closer to the situation that Edward Relph called placelessness, with their social umbilical cord cut off. In this situation nowadays, the thesis argues that returning to rural areas and using external resources to support villages is an approach to the balance between rural and urban. Remote villages as regions separated from developed regions, represent an exception among the mature system, or a parallel development trajectory compared with urban capitalism(Swell, 2005). In this sense, the remote region may solve current issues of the mainstream system by offering an alternative option to people or containing events that change the current situation. To approach the structural significance of the remote areas today, it’s necessary to reduce local life to authenticity by pushing cooperation and resisting placelessness. For the cooperation mode of this kind of village, Kevin Donovan and Menelaos Gkartzios argued that the vernacular approach of rural regeneration means a comprehensive, bottom-up cooperation mode that combines the advantages of exogenous and endogenous. This means introducing people from other regions to explore new life modes and pushing local people’s cooperation are the same important. On the other hand, reinforcing the sense of place is crucial for the resistance against homogenization and specialization. Frampton has pointed out the importance of marks and boundaries in forming a region in Heidegger’s sense, which corresponds to Aldo Rossi’s argument on permanence. So according to the discussion above, the design project focuses on monumentality and sustainability. The first point is the key to inscribing the region and reinforcing the sense of place, and the second point is the way to establish continuous memory and history, and push cooperation between villagers. These two aspects are represented by the division between the foundation and the roof in a tectonic sense, as their characters are shown as being both durable and temporary. Also, the design tries to use prefabricated timber and recycled materials from the original buildings to approach sustainability.

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Supervisor

Ahlava, Antti

Thesis advisor

Zubillaga, Laura

Keywords

village, rural areas, regeneration, monumentality, recycle, timber, foundation

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https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202501231641

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[master] Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu / ARTS