Hangzhou firm gad·Line+ Studio consulted with its end users during the planning stages of this 50-unit affordable-housing project for farmers disenfranchised from their land due to China’s rapid urbanization. As a result of this consultation, the design for the new community broke with the government’s conventional, high-rise form of social housing and embraced rural traditions that would be more familiar to its future inhabitants. The architects organized the three-storey households into groups of six around a communal courtyard and clustered these multi-unit blocks into a loose grid for a built environment of more than 15,000 square metres that, with such touches as distinctive roof forms, mimics the streetscapes of traditional villages.

Project: Contemporary Rural Cluster: Dongziguan Affordable Housing Location: Hangzhou, China Firm: gad·Line+ Studio, China

Team: Fanhao Meng with Min Zhu, Qiang Li and Xiaocheng Zhu