The rise of rural constructions attracts architects to rush into the wild rural area as aliens, hunting for the meaning of construction there. Most architects focus on rural cultures and consider “nostalgia” as a major concept in their design works. The difficulty here is how to represent this poetic, yet abstract concept with a physical presence of architecture. For us, to regain nostalgia is to regain the lost sense of belonging to the community and the homeland by means of architecture. There used to be a core public space in Chinese villages, but most of them have become desolate nowadays as the removal of the village host. Therefore, it requires designers, from the beginning of a rural project, to locate that lost space and start from there. In Qinquan Village, we found that core public space defined by an east-west axis, which starts from the village memorial gate and ends at where the village committee building is. Core area as such naturally became our design priority.

Across the entire plaza, we designed a series of zigzag short walls, enclosing multiple micro plaza spaces on both sides of the axis, which provide seats and canopies with the existing trees and Roman columns. Introducing into our design more graphics is an extra experiment we did in this project. We took advices from the local residents for themes of the paintings on the short walls, which did enrich the spatial experience with paintings that are more familiar to the local, bringing the project closer to the village.