“Senza mostrare i muscoli”: i progetti di rigenerazione di Tao+C e AZL nel solco della “prosperosa società” della Cina contemporanea

Abstract

In 2019 the young Shanghai studio Atelier Tao+C builds in the village of Qinlongwu, in the heart of the Zhejiang Province rural area, a building with a complicated and alien functional program: a library capable of hosting a “capsule hotel” to differentiate the rural accommodation offer to the young and emerging middle class. This project has been anticipated a few kilometres away by the more expert designer Zheng Lei, who designed in 2015 a community library for the ShanShe ethnic minority in DaiJiaShan village. Both are coming from cultural investments they aim to reinforce territorial ties, dealing with transcalar processes, political understanding and planning action. They fall within more significant investments, involving local institutions intent on reviving depressed areas through cultural operations and on the other metropolitan investors open to experimenting new markets. This process has to be observed in the logic of Chinese national policies, which is turning its five-year development plans towards its countryside. However, the projects do not translate those political leaps forward with personal authorship, but instead establishing refinements of something that the landscape already suggests. This attitude measures the intimate spatial instances through which the new generation of Chinese architects contours their own identity: avoiding self-representation and disciplinary sovereignty, it insists in dilated observation times, multi-perspectives and the desire to verify in the long term the tenacity of possible territorial links.