Xu Tiantian () is a Chinese architect who is the founding principal architect of DnA Design and Architecture. She has engaged extensively in the rural revitalizing process in China. She has received numerous awards, such as the WA China Architecture Award in 2006 and 2008, the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architect in 2019, and the 14th International Prize for Sustainable Architecture Gold Medal; in 2020, she was appointed an Honorary Fellow of American Institute of Architects. For Xu, architecture has the capacity to transform lives and to impact the society it serves while following the mandate of the times.
Early life and education
Xu was born in 1975 in Fujian, China. She notes that her architectural interests likely were born out of her childhood home in Fujian – a large compound holding more than 100 people. The traditional home with layers of courtyards and corridors stands out in Xu’s mind for its beauty.
Xu received her B.Arch from Beijing’s Tsinghua University and her M.A. in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Career and design approach
Growing up in China in the 1970s and 80s, Xu experienced the transformation of the urban landscape from traditional to modern. With China’s Reform and Opening of the 1980s, the rural population of China’s historically agrarian society began to pour into cities seeking new opportunities; the countryside was left with the elderly and children, unattended farmland, and run-down houses. Much of Xu’s work represents a response to this transformation: she does not want leave rural communities left behind. This focus on China’s rural communities is evident in her interview for Many Voices: Architecture for Social Equity:In China, rural people are still half of our population – as is true for most of the globe – so I have chosen to focus on rural communities. Many things are needed in rural areas to face this modern era, not just by modernisation but by approaching each rural context and history with sensitivity. The issues could be very different in different places – even our work changes very much from village to village. It’s very important to respect the individuality of each project.In calling for sensitive architectural interventions, Xu advocates for an approach known as “Architectural Acupuncture.” This “Architectural Acupuncture” addresses holistically the social and economic revitalization of rural China by minimizing interventions, in order to promote long-term sustainable development of rural communities, without a dependence upon governmental or large-industry investments. She specifies:What is a sensitive approach? It is acupuncture – to respect the issues and circumstances of the individual, and by extension, local agricultural production and architectural heritage. Acupuncture targets the specific points of the specific individual; it is neither random nor predetermined. You need to find out what the village is and what [interventions] it would be proud of – be it an agricultural factory, a heritage centre, a leisure/culture, or perhaps a bridge.This approach has been described as a “multi-layered socio-economic healing process” producing prosperity that incentivizes life in rural regions.
Songyang
Xu’s rural focus began with a commission for a hotel project on a tea plantation on a mountain in Songyang County, an agricultural county of some 400 villages located approximately 250 miles southeast of Shanghai. The work presented Xu’s first substantial interaction with rural China. Songyang wanted to promote rural tourism and a form of nostalgia as part of an idea of national rejuvenation. At the time, Xi Jinping had promoted “cultural self-confidence” and sought to develop rural areas in order to achieve a balance between the urban and rural. Since 2016, Song’s work has continued to concentrate on Songyang. She has developed a series of thoughtful projects that promote the region’s cultural heritage, such as a brown-sugar factory in the village of Xing (2016) that theatrically displays for visitors the artisanal process, and a memorial hall in Wang (2017), which tells the story of a legendary 14th-century scholar, Wang Jing, a native of the village. These projects not only have helped slow down the rural exodus from Songyang but also have attracted city dwellers, both tourists and new residents. These and other such “architectural acupunctures” are distributed across large parts of the county’s territory in the form of relatively unassuming structures.