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 A6
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AS FOUND HOUSES
EXPERIMENTS FROM SELF-BUILDERS IN RURAL CHINA

ai
3:1
APPLIED
RESEARCH JOHN LIN AND
+cl •DESIGN
PUBLISHING SONY DEVABHAKTUNI
 205
NARRATIVE, AS FOUND ANDTOLD

In considering the documentation of the houses that are a part

of this book, we returned often to their stories, or narratives;
narrative implying an ordered telling that at once construe s
and reflects a certain logic. The time of a narrative can move
forward or backward, and always comprises the juxtaposition
of a t least two temporalities: that which is unfolding in the story
being told and the time of its telling.This temporal juxtaposition
contributes to the articulation of the narrative's logic and its leg­
ibility. Within architecture, "narrative" is also used to describe
a construction of meaning through the assemblage of materia ,
cultural, and social significations: of a site, project, or design s
with all storytellers, the credibility of an architectural narrator
can be compromised.
In As Found Houses, we construct narratives through the
overlay of descriptions of selected houses with the voices of
people whose lives are implicated within them.The narratives ot
the houses were discerned through site visits, photography, and
drawings; of the people through discussions and interviews. By
combining the two, it was possible to gain an understanding o
the architecture of the houses and their transformations: for ex­
ample, how a change in family structure led to an addition onto a
house, or when accessibility to labor made certain building deci­
sions possible.The record of each house's adaptations could be
understood as the manifestation of the residents' histories, their
shifting lives mapped onto the architecture itself. In some parts
of the world, it is unusual for a lifetime to be lived within a single
house, but many of the houses documented in this book were
made and cared for by a single generation, or one family over
a longer duration.They are family houses, built by the people
who live in them. . ™
These material and human histories comprise a text that op­
erates in a reciprocal relation with cultural, social, and economic
contexts. Some interviews provide anecdotal support for empirica
findings from social science on rural transformation. Other times,
those findings explain the material changes that we observed in
house construction. While there are many macro-narratives of
rural transformation China, the story that became important for
us concerned a retelling of vernacular arch'tec|t,u^e^hl^n^aT'n®
was articulated through the observation of self-built adapta ons
to traditional typologies.The dynamic and contingent gual ty of
these houses challenges an understanding of the vernacular that
is staid or of the past.The accelerated speed of contemporary
China's transformation has rendered them VISI^'
the legibility of changes that have been going on for centuries,
hidden by duration.
 AS FOUND HOUSES 206

Where past research into these architectures turned most

often to well-preserved case studies, we looked instead for houses
that were disfigured and adultered: houses that deviated from
historical modes of building to propose new hybrid relationships
between material, space, and program.To do this, we systemati­
cally avoided villages that were known tourist destinations, or, on
the other hand, were remote and difficult to access. Instead, we
followed recently built, well-traveled, local roads or looked for
sites close to regional towns. In these less isolated communities,
builders more freely propose new ideas and have easy access to
materials and labor.The process of change is accelerated.These
new constructions —by local self-builders looking to fulfill spe­
cific needs —proliferate throughout the countryside, their value
unremarked. But it was exactly these houses that we sought to
learn more about.

In this way of looking for and learning from the ordinary, the
work enters into a dialogue with "architectural ethnography"
as articulated by Momoyo Kaijima andYoshiharuTsukamoto of
Atelier Bow-Wow since the late 1990s. Architectural ethnography
builds on a tradition of research in Japan that foregrounds the
observation and documentation of architecture as part of a larger
network of human and ecological relations. In 2001, Kaijima and
Tsukamoto elaborated on this approach in their search for da-me
and "Pet" architecture in Made in Tokyo. They argued that these
spatial categories were inherent to the urbanity ofTokyo, but
because of their idiosyncratic specificity, did not register within
normative urban readings. Fieldwork—conceived as an embedded,
long-term implication with a site and community—was a critical
tool. Walks inTokyo over many years became the primary driver
of documentation.These peregrinations made it possible to have
a continuous discussion with the urban landscape, looking for
unnoticed aspects of the city. The early studies ofTokyo led to more
recent investigations of ecological and human processes within
rural villages, suburban landscapes, and seaside towns.
Ethnography itself has often studied these processes. Where
architectural ethnography differs is in its insistent and intensive
use of drawing as a form of documentation. Drawing is opera­
tive within architectural ethnography both as a process and as
an output of that process, as a verb describing an action and its
nominative object. As documents, drawings can function through
established codes of architectural representation, or innovated
notations.They can measure material, tectonic, and spatial rela­
tions, or make visible qualities of time, growth, or change.These
processes, in turn, articulate social and economic forces in ways
SONY DEVABHAKTUNI 207

that often surpass language alone. While an ethnographic study

of vernacular adaptations to rural housing could function en­
tirely without them, drawings deploy a mode of interrogation
and construct an articulation of knowledge that is specifically
architectural. Drawings, as an outcome of ethnographic observa­
tion, are scientific objects of social engagement.
Through the axonometric drawings of As Found Houses we
wanted to convey a certain immediacy about the houses that
comprised a direct and instant apprehension of their qualities.
This immediacy relates to the accessibility of the axonometric
as a mode of architectural drawing.The axonometries render the
houses into discrete objects of study.They make visible specific
readings of the spatial, constructive or material facts, such that
the houses each become legible characters. Each character then
enters into a relation with other aspects of the research that de­
scribe the contingent conditions that led to its articulation. Within
the context of a proliferation of hybrid construction in the Chinese
countryside—and the acceleration of changes to the rural—the leg­
ibility of the axonometries and the immediacy they proffer carries
the weight of the narratives that are told within the book.
The plan drawings address a longer time-space. In part, they
try to communicate the ideal, typological origin that informs
each of the houses. This origin can both constrain and allow
variation. It can be made more legible through the process of
transformation or recede and disappear into a latent condition.
The challenge within the drawings was to create an oscillation
between recent design decisions linked to program, materials,
and construction and the more embedded condition of typology.
In the smaller houses—the wooden and underground—we draw
furniture and objects to describe the new ways in which families
appropriate the spaces of their houses; these modes of living
are sometimes linked to the additions and alterations they have
made.They can also be clues to how the houses could change
in the future.
The axonometry and plan drawings that describe each house
are derived from measurements, photographs, and notes taken
during fieldwork-a process familiar to any architect confronted
with a new project. The effort of carefully recording existing
conditions at a given site provides information and insight for
the future. Nevertheless, measurements and photographs in­
variably produce an incomplete record, such that drawing be­
comes an informed extrapolation from those facts that are better
understood.The process of drawing an existing structure also
calls for an empathetic projection into the mind of the earlier
builder or architect, into their decisions and logic. Drawing and
 AS FOUND HOUSES 208

re-drawing lines become a kind of excavation into this thinking

that simultaneously develops the sensibility of the one who is re­
drawing: clarifying the present through the past and binding the
architect in a specifically architectural way—through drawing —
to what they are studying.
Essential to ethnography is its self-reflexive questioning of
the link between subject and researcher.This link can be mutually
influencing, such that both researcher and subject are affected and
transformed by observation. Observation, regardless of whether
it is active or passive, transforms the subject. Reciprocally, obser­
vation also influences the researcher who changes through the
experience of the work. In architectural ethnography, we could
argue that this process of mutual influence operates upon draw­
ing as well as the researcher. An architect drawing what they see
transforms the tools of their practice.The close observation of the
worlds being studied becomes a resource forthinking about archi­
tecture. Research, in this sense, ultimately influences design. In
trying to understand a phenomenon outside of ourselves through
drawing, the architect is able to instrumentalize the research at
its origins.

In his 1995 essay, "The Artist as Ethnographer," Hal Foster describes

a wariness about an ethnographic turn in art.This shift in practice
and exhibition comprised artists who used fieldwork within mar­
ginalized communities to identify transgressive social or cultural
practices that would become a resource for making artworks.
These found communities were marginal in the sense of being
outside of the mainstream, either physically removed and remote
or outcast through other forms of distancing.
The artist, Foster argues, refashions these communities and
their experience into a reconstituted representation destined for
the gallery or museum. He describes "a vogue for pseudoethno-
graphic reports in art that are sometimes disguised travelogues
from the world art market[,j" and asks: "Who in the academy or
the art world has not witnessed these new forms of flanerie?"
The turn toward ethnography was motivated by envy toward the
discipline as a perceived "science of alterity" that was able to take
culture as its object while also embedding itself into local contexts
through fieldwork. Ethnography also invited self-critique through
its reflexive need to consider the subject-researcher relationship
as well as other disciplinary methodologies and objectives.
In Foster's art-world, the artist reconstitutes his practice
through the authority of the other, such that research into the ethno­
graphic subject ultimately circles back into the figure of the artist
who remains at the center. Attempts to situate this cycle within
SONY DEVABHAKTUNI 209

collaborative processes or as destabilizations of political agency

were undermined by their institutional context within galleries or
museums that were part of larger systems of exclusion. Foster is
writing about a specific moment in time within a circumscribed
world of art practices, but his caution could also be turned toward
architectural ethnography.
Is the art-world flaneur that Foster describes no different
from the architectural tourist? Does architectural ethnography
simply produce "disguised travelogues" without the reflexive
criticality that characterizes and constitutes ethnography as
a discipline? Books that have been influential for us, such as
Architecture without Architects or Learning from Las Vegas, are
deeply rooted within the discipline's arms-length relationship
with tourism, at once partaking in its opportunities, but assert­
ing a critical distance in the name of research. Made in Tokyo
is itself fashioned as a guide-book for the other Tokyo: the city
as it is never depicted within regular tourist publications. And
architectural ethnography, in its engagement not only with the
built environment but also with communities, enters into a terrain
that makes Foster's questions even more relevant. Is it possible
for architecture to adopt ethnographic methods that foreground
the human realm in a way that doesn't instrumentalize those
subjects and simply re-inscribe the architect's expertise?

The interviews that appear in this book are narrative overlays

onto the drawings. If drawing offers a tool for looking at the
houses that is specifically architectural, the interviews with
residents, builders, and villagers adopt a method that is more
closely linked to ethnography.These discussions were recorded,
transcribed, and translated from Mandarin dialects into English,
edited into first-person accounts, anonymized, and edited again.
The interview texts are several times removed from the words
that were spoken. This string of mediations between what
was uttered and what appears makes their constructed nature
explicit.The winding stories that result do not always touch on
the houses and most do not refer directly to them.
The photographs of the houses function as documentary
evidence. While some were taken to provide a record that could
be used later, others were shot with the objective of transmit­
ting specific information.They most often stand alone on their
pages within the book, offering a quality of space, material,
and place that other forms of documentation are less capable
of conveying. In this sense, they straddle the dual functions of
affirming a certain veracity and describing ineffable qualities
that are beyond verification.
 AS FOUND HOUSES

We identify each house with a descriptive name instead of

through a geographic location—for example the village where
they are situated. Through the name, the character described
with the axonometric drawing is made explicit.The names frame
a specific spatial or programmatic reading of their transforma­
tion while also generalizing the houses with this reduction.The
naming provokes a reconsideration of the proliferation of adapted
houses through the specificity of the strategies of self-builders.
The houses can be found everywhere in the countryside, yet each
house is a singular character. In naming them, we argue for the
value of the transformations as acts of architecture.
The drawings, photographs, interviews, and texts function
analytically in their articulation of possible narratives.They are
descriptive elements that reflect readings of the houses we en­
countered and judgments about what was important in each.The
book functions through the space opened up by the juxtaposition
of these descriptive layers. That space is at once delimited and
potential, open to other possible readings. Juxtaposition can
render such a space when each descriptive element maintains
a certain autonomy. In this sense, the drawings are complete in
themselves, while still in dialogue with each other. Each photo is
a story of its own. And the interviews, despite the steps mediating
their reception, present the villagers' voices in ways that surpass
the frame of the book.
The force of narratives that occupy such a space, at once
delimited and potential, I would argue, lies in their irresoiuble
quality, in the way they can oscillate between a singular telling
and other retellings.This value is qualified not by narrative hold
over a subject, but rather by the ability to sustain and disperse
resonances, thus returning a degree of autonomy to that subject.
In this way, the houses in this book remain to be found.
What, for us, has been meaningful is how they so unexpect­
edly manifest architecture's capacity to both register and enact
changes to ways of living, and to the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FUNDING

A team of architects and student research­ The research at the origin of As Found
ers helped make this book possible. Houses was funded by the University
We are grateful for their efforts and always Grants Committee General Research Fund
keen eyes. of the Hong Kong SAR government.
A grant from the design publishing
RESEARCH LEADER fund of the Department of Architecture,
Eva Herunter University of Hong Kong, helped with the
production of the book.
RESEARCHERS The Faculty of Architecture, through
Rebekka Hirschberg its support of the Rural Urban Framework,
Xia Chengwei facilitated investigations that are at the
project's origin and the lab structure that
TRANSLATION served as home to the research.
Liu Chang

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
ChanYuen Shing Finn
Cheung Wai-Lun Vernon
CheungYui Ming
Chung BingTsun Lester
Phoebe Cowen
Fan Xinkai
BoYee Lau
LinYingying
Lu Sixiao
Chiara Oggioni
Josephine Saabye
ShenYifan
SunYi
Haotian Zhang
 AS FOUND HOUSES

IMAGE CREDITS AUTHORS

John Lin and Sony Devabhaktuni
Page 6, by Graf zu Castell-Rudenhausen.
Used with the permission of the copyright CONTRIBUTORS
holder. Yung Ho Chang

All other images were taken as part GRAPHIC DESIGN

of the research. Studio Otamendi (Manuela Dechamps
Otamendi assisted by LaurineTribolet
No image may be reproduced without and Benny Ouioui)
the permission of the authors.
COVER DESIGN
IMPRINT Chiara Oggioni and Haotian Zhang

Published by Applied Research COPY-EDITING

and Design Publishing, an imprint ASSISTANCE
of ORO Editions. Rebecca Reading
Gordon Goff: Publisher
PROOFREADING
www.appliedresearchanddesign.com Phoebe Cowen
[email protected]
PROJECT MANAGER
Copyright © 2020 John Lin Jake Anderson
and Sony Devabhaktuni.
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