Zijiang Ye
Disappearing Echo: towards a reconstruction of the absent history of Chinese vernacular architecture through collective memory

Significance claim

This project aims to provide a different perspective on the vernacular architectural research of Dongshan Town in the 1970s, and to give those buildings more inclusive possibilities. I collected the oral history of Dongshan Town over the past 50 years through interviews and conversations between residents to extract the microhistories and stories of everyday spaces contained in memory. Those narrative discourses from local residents connect the past and present architectural spaces, thus giving the three-dimensional physical architecture another dynamic dimension. It may be helpful to understand the modern vernacular architecture of China by combining architecture with the collective memory rather than focusing solely on the aesthetic appearance and historical value of those buildings. The spatial values of the vernacular buildings in Dongshan Town are constantly reshaped, and in this practice, they are transformed into carriers of collective memory to enrich and disturb the existing architectural records of Dongshan Town. On the other hand, through my communication with local residents, I found that their attitude towards the buildings built after liberation(1949) is indifferent and negative. Due to the long time interval, most interviewees' memories of the past buildings have been blurred, and they are unable to verbally describe the architectural images in memory well. Therefore, in the practice of oral history method, I tried different dialogic modes to guide the interviewees to recall and express the past, so as to break the aphasia caused by the long silence. The subjectivity of local residents of Dongshan Town is fully recorded in the process of interview, and finally constitutes a bottom-up map of Dongshan Town villagers’ memory anchors.