Wutopia Lab designed Building 3 for Fortune Art Homestay, Xiyaotou Village, ?Stangers? – Room with a rejected view, which was opened at the end of June 2021. Photography by CreatAR Images.

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“I have only had two experiences living in the countryside. The first experience was studying farming in Chongming farm for one month in my sophomore year of high school, and the second was living in a farmhouse in Wutai Mountain for one month in the summer of my sophomore year, which were my only two rural experiences on countryside. As I was saying, I am a stranger to the countryside.
In the four or five years before I designed this building, I did receive many invitations to do projects in the countryside. For various reasons, they were not implemented. But this gave me the experience to think about it. Looking back on these projects, I did not get rid of the influence of regionalism, trying to use the materials and constructions of the wooden roof frame, rammed earth, brick, concrete, and glass to create a kind of regional architecture that the architect sees as being appropriate for the countryside. But these buildings are strangers disguised as locals. It is a bit hypocritical to the locals. So, in this project in Xiyaotou Village, I confronted my identity as a stranger in the village and expressed a simple and direct gesture of how to understand or change the local landscape or activate local life as a strang...