The search of a new residential typology for Guangzhou | An Experiment for the Application of early GVDMA | Location: Guangzhou, China | Scale: 42,000 SF | Time: 2006 ~ Present

The pursuit is an investigation and speculation of historical and current residential typology of the City of Guangzhou (Canton). The early application of GVDMA lead me to discover the essence of residential quality of the city: the separation and combination of different generations of the family. In order to create a system/infrastructure of the residential type, the project introduced a modular system for the flexibility and modifiability of the future dwelling type.

Throughout our history, dwelling, the fundamental unit of inhabitation, is a conjugated miniature which embodies the local people's cultural ideologies of household structure, traditional family value, heritage and long-term development. Since China's independence in 1949, high-rise social housings and commercial apartments for the baby-boomer generations have gradually replaced vernacular housing types and occupied broadly in Guang Zhou's (Canton) cityscape. Being lack of indigenous formal characteristics as well as programmatic flexibility, these generic residential apartment buildings designed for nuclear families architecturally disintegrate Cantonese family dwelling traditions and the vernacular cityscape. As Guang Zhou government is demolishing low quality residential buildings in order to re-sculpt the cityscape and the population will face the retirement crisis of the baby-boomer generations fifteen years later; this thesis aims to examine the implementation of the only-child couple dwelling in Guang Zhou's city center. (Under the birth-control plan issued by the Chinese government in 1980, each couple of the baby-boomer generations who lives in cities would be only allowed to have one child. In the coming 30 years, these only-childs will be the main labor resource of the country). This new conjugated dwelling, with its structural adaptability and programmatic flexibility, will not only address and reinforce Cantonese dwelling traditions by providing the independent co-inhabitation space for the three generations of a family; but it will also help to re-form the "quality of place" of a neighborhood by providing community programs. The Conjugated Dwelling will become a new type of architectural entity to evoke the consciousness of architectural heritage and sustainable long-term development of the city.