A geography design: the river as an architectural fact. The construction of the embankment in the rural villages of Fujian (China)

The Chinese rural landscape, selected as a case study for this occasion, constitutes an extraordinary research experience on the profound meaning of forms in their universal relationship with Nature; it represents the field of application of a theoretical reflection that nourishes itself in a circular relationship with the praxis of the project. The investigation concerns the architecture/ landscape system, characterised by a stringent and specific relationship between settlement structures, territorial infrastructures and forms of land use. The redevelopment project of the river village of Hongkeng, in Fujian, a Southeastern province, describes the process of recognising the analogical correspondences between Nature and Architecture, taking the topological condition of “passage” and “limit” as a place of research. The void becomes project material, connective tissue capable of giving meaning to the built environment: a space of relationship and happening, a place of representation of architecture with a territorial dimension. The circular Chinese fortress-houses (Tulou), scattered along the river routes, between rice fields and wooden bridges, constitute the minimal unit of the village: a rural archipelago made up of “city-buildings” that host entire communities, in which the large courtyard assumes the role of “public space”, of “urban scene”. Ancestral earthen enclosures, monumental res of Nature, isolated and at the same time connected by the same landscape, refer to a universal history of forms. A concave and simultaneously convex form of “amphibious and terrestrial” origin, Tulou are endowed with a great formalising and structuring power. The enclosure becomes the system that measures the relationships between the parts that make up the territorial geography, a form that becomes a sign, the expression of its content, meaning and signifier in the semiotics of the landscape.