To Heal & to Help

As China’s urbanisation continues to speed along, generic architecture is becoming the norm, as is the wholesale demolition of older, more ‘traditional’ structures. Taking a stance against this is the Angdong Hospital, for which Joshua Bolchover and John Lin of Rural Urban Framework won the first RIBA International Emerging Architect prize in late 2016.

- Phoebe Liu

Throughout China, the process of urbanisation in developing areas has led to vast amounts of construction of generic building types using standardised materials. The majority of these buildings are concrete frame structures with brick infill, clad in ceramic tiles.

Houses are three to four storeys high, often with a cantilevered first floor, with flat roofs that are used for drying clothes or food. Institutions such as schools or hospitals are also standardised slab blocks, single loaded with corridor access. Variation in these typologies is slight and occurs predominantly through tiling patterns or the introduction of balcony spaces.

Alongside this construction process is the simultaneous demolition of old fabric, deemed unsuitable, in China’s era of modernisation by government bureaus and villagers alike. In this process, many vernacular buildings that use traditional materials such as mud bricks, grey bricks and clay tiles are destroyed and often lie piled up by the roadside.

Taking a stance against this is the Angdong Hospital in China’s Baojing county, Hunan province — but rather than reverting to a nostalgia for lost craftsmanship or for a ‘Chinese’ architectural identity, the design approach was to accept modernisation yet integrate techniques and material strategies that register this as a process of continuity rather than as a schism.