The Revolution of Housing

He told me that what he wanted to focus on was how to promote what he called a revolution in housing—how to truly change the way our homes are conceived and built.

He began by showing an ordinary residential community, the kind that many young people dream of living in. “But,” he said, “we need to ask ourselves a question. What exactly is this ideal of residence we imagine? What kind of ideal is it? Is it really yours? Or is it the market’s? Is it the developer’s?”

He said that, in fact, within the current system of housing and construction, the user—the person who actually lives there—is completely excluded from the decision-making process. Whether it is land monopoly or the commercialization of housing, within the way this market operates, designers almost never truly understand the needs of end users. Between us—the inhabitants—and the designers, there is almost no dialogue at all. In other words, the final user has no decision-making power whatsoever.

Then he turned to look at the countryside. “In the countryside,” he said, “the situation is the opposite. Farmers have tremendous power in deciding how to build their own houses. They can build whatever they like. But their ability to improve technically is very low.”

He said that because the rural housing market is so low-end, professional designers seldom enter that field, and so they cannot provide a more complete service. As a result, most rural houses in China remain in their current rough condition. “It’s very hard to see refined, elegant, or even humorous rural houses,” he said.

He then compared housing to the evolution of other everyday products. “Look at mobile phones,” he said. “That’s roughly a 500-dollar market. A phone lasts one to two years. In thirty years, its evolution has been dramatic.”

“Look at computers,” he continued. “That’s a 1 000-dollar market. A computer lasts three to five years. The change in the last thirty years has also been enormous.”

“Now look at cars,” he said. “A car is a 10 000-dollar market. It lasts five to ten years, and it too has transformed tremendously over the past three decades.”

Then he paused before asking, “But what about housing?”

He said that the lifespan of a house spans from ten to fifty, even up to a hundred years. “Its value,” he said, “is about 100 000 dollars — and of course, now there’s no upper limit. But we rarely think about how housing itself can evolve.”

“Because its lifespan is so long,” he said, “its technological progress is extremely slow. The main reason, I think, is that we haven’t separated the different layers of the problem — land, the housing framework, the interior ‘organ’ of the house, the infrastructure.”

“People bundle everything together,” he said. “We call it real estate, and because of that, we are held hostage by the land.”

He told me that what people really demand from housing is not the house itself but the location—the land, the position. “We crave the site,” he said, “not the technological improvements of the house itself. That’s why the structure of housing prices in China and abroad are completely reversed.”

He explained that in China’s real-estate prices, land can account for fifty to seventy, even eighty percent of total cost, while the actual building—the house itself—is compressed into a tiny share. “In other countries,” he said, “it’s the opposite.”

“This,” he said, “is why the technical quality and construction performance of our housing are so low.”

He showed me a concept drawing from the 1930s. “It depicts how diverse villas could be stacked together to form a high-density residential environment,” he said.

“In that drawing,” he pointed out, “you can clearly see that the user’s needs are fully expressed. It satisfies the urban requirement for density while fulfilling each individual’s dream of living space.”

He said that this original drawing from decades ago looked like science fiction at the time, but even today, it has not been realized. “I think this,” he said, “is the direction we should move toward — a single building that could contain a 300-square-meter villa and also a 30-square-meter apartment, with equal quality though different in size.”

Then he took me back further in history. “This,” he said, “is a traditional agricultural-era family compound — a large clan household. You can see the extremely complex web of social relationships. But this structure gave everyone a sense of security and mutual help.”

“Today,” he said, “under industrialization, all those extended families have been decomposed into small nuclear ones, each person placed inside a standardized grid.”

He explained that within that grid, the differences among families are huge — differences in wealth, in structure, in need. “So how do we fit such a rich social fabric into the standardized industrial housing grid?” he asked. “That’s the source of many of today’s social conflicts, unhappy families, and the very roots of our high housing prices.”

He told me that in the design of their Expo Village project, they divided buildings into four systems: the muscle, bone, skin, and organ. From the structural frame with a hundred-year lifespan, to the skin system, to the internal “organ” that lasts only ten to twenty-five years — they hoped to create an open architectural system. “Open,” he said, “so the internal spaces can be freely combined.”

He showed me an example: their housing project that won the Residential Comprehensive Gold Award at the Shenzhen Biennale. “If we think of a residence as a filter between human beings and nature,” he said, “it protects and shelters people inside, while filtering natural elements—energy, water, and information—into usable form for humans.”

“To understand this,” he said, “we must study every dwelling’s relationship with natural factors — energy, sunlight, wind — and how they distribute across the façade.”

He displayed a wind-simulation diagram. “You can see,” he said, “that each window on the façade has its own micro-climate.” He reminded me that traditional Chinese thought values feng shui, literally “wind and water.” “Wind, water, and sunlight,” he said, “are crucial.”

“After we simulate sunlight and solar movement,” he said, “we can create a map of natural resources on the façade. Its composition is no longer the traditional three-part elevation of classical aesthetics — it’s now about how the building interfaces with nature.”

He explained that they also provide a complete virtual model library. “At the low-end,” he said, “there are passive solutions — you can plant sun-loving or shade-loving plants. At the high-end, there are solar water heaters, photovoltaic panels, adjustable blinds, and many other components you can select in the digital warehouse.”

He described the entire residence: “We have an organ system,” he said, “a container for lifestyle, like a capsule, like a large appliance.”

“That appliance,” he said, “should run on DC electricity. In the future, when we return home, we won’t need all kinds of adapters for our DC computers, phones, TVs. We’ll just use USB ports to charge everything.”

He said that the whole residence should function as one large appliance — with DC refrigerators, DC air-conditioners — plugged into the long-lasting framework infrastructure of the building. “That infrastructure,” he said, “we hope will last one to two hundred years.”He told me that the outer skin of the building could also be chosen in diverse ways. “So in the end,” he said, “each building can be constructed through residents’ participation — by letting them take part in ordering and decision-making.”

He explained that in their system, every designer would work one-on-one with residents, providing services similar to interior decoration, but extended to the entire architectural system. “That way,” he said, “the whole housing system can fully integrate with the users’ needs, and decision-making power can finally be returned to them.”

He said they had even made an interactive video for this idea. “In this direction,” he said, “we hope to create an interface that allows easier interaction with users. Like playing a video game, people can enter the virtual room and select each building material.”

“In reality,” he said, “this places the user’s needs at the front end of the entire production chain of housing. The designer then follows the process all the way through, coordinating with manufacturers and developers, to fulfill those user choices.”

He paused for a moment, then added, “We often compare a house to something else — a car parked inside a parking garage.”

“In this metaphor,” he explained, “the user chooses which kind of car to buy — different models, different styles — while the developer only provides the parking space.”

Then he shifted the focus to what he called the “organ” part of the system — the interior core. “Let’s look at this video,” he said. “You can see that when this box is transported to the site, depending on its grade, it can be opened automatically or manually. Whether it’s equipped with solar panels or roof greenery — all of that is chosen by the user.”

“What’s more important,” he said, “is its assembly time. We hope it can be assembled in under three hours. That way, people can experience living close to reservoirs, or near the countryside — places filled with natural charm.”

“For us,” he said, “we treat this small house as an experimental unit of our muscle-bone-skin-organ system, constantly pushing it forward.”

“Through these experiments,” he continued, “we promote the evolution of technological components and materials.”

He said, “That’s why we pay special attention to the recycling of construction materials, and also to the diversity of aesthetic experiments.”

He emphasized again that they were paying attention to the lowest end of the market.

“This,” he said, “was a rural housing project we did during post-earthquake reconstruction in the Shaanxi–Gansu region, working together with Professor Xia Zhujiu from Taiwan.”

“We brought thin-walled light-steel technology into rural areas,” he said. “You can see that this kind of construction is very convenient. None of the steps require cement. Among all the trades, there is only carpentry work.”

He told me, “This was our demonstration house in Dujiangyan after the earthquake. That prototype still stands there. If you ever travel to Chengdu or Dujiangyan, you can go see it.”

He said their more recent work had been in Guizhou. “There,” he said, “people still build houses with traditional timber frames.”

“Of course,” he said, “that brings a huge fire hazard, and at the same time, they face the challenge of lacking raw materials.”

“We’re now trying to maintain the structural feature of ‘the walls may fall, but the house stands.’”

He explained that traditional houses could take years to build, and that people would adjust functions as they went, depending on their changing lives. “Such houses,” he said, “were completely integrated with the lives of their inhabitants. That,” he said firmly, “is the true origin of architecture.”

He showed me images of an elegant structural system. “This year,” he said, “we plan to convert this type of structure into a 3D computer model that can automatically print steel components — but we’ll keep its open nature.”

“That way,” he said, “houses can be purchased as complete sets of components, like Lego toys. People can bring them home and assemble them like IKEA furniture. This will greatly reduce the cost of rural housing construction.”

He said they also made designs for post-flood regions in Cambodia. “You can see,” he said, “that the raised sections are built above flood level, so when the water rises, those parts get submerged.”

He showed another case. “This is the Australian market,” he said. “In Australia, housing integration has gone even further.”

“There, houses are built as one box after another,” he explained. “Because the main cost there is labor — about 300 U.S. dollars per person per day — while here it’s 300 RMB. So if we export prefabricated houses from China to Australia, their housing cost drops significantly.”

He said that Australia, too, was facing the problem of sharply rising housing prices and young people unable to afford homes. “Their houses,” he said, “are also becoming smaller. Three-hundred-square-meter villas have been reduced to fifty-square-meter micro-apartments.”

He told me that this was the Etopia team — many of them professors from Tongji University — and that other professors were also driving forward the revolution of housing technology.

He said, “If we can break buildings apart, soften them, make them flexible, and help them adapt to social change, then maybe that’s the fundamental technical contribution architects can make to social reform.”

Then he grew serious again. “Of course,” he said, “we know the real difficulties we face today. The biggest problems in China’s real estate industry aren’t technical. Technology, in fact, is not the problem.”

“The key issue,” he said, “is how to let every person return to their proper position — with clear responsibilities, rights, and interests.”

He listed them one by one: “The government manages the land. Developers handle the structure — the bookshelf. And the users decide what books to put on it.”

“Only by decomposing the product across its full life cycle, and letting everyone make their own decisions and take responsibility for them,” he said, “can manufacturers find direction and research truly advance.”

Finally, he said, “I hope that in today’s China, especially now that new policies are being introduced and the new government is promoting reform, this revolution in housing — this ideal of new living — can be realized as soon as possible.”

And with that, he concluded his words simply: “Thank you all.”