ARCH5110/6210A
Advanced Architectural Design Studio I & II: FIELDS – Fermenting Territories
Target Students MArch1, MArch2
Course Term 1 & 2
Course Type Studio
Venue Studio
Teacher(s) CHAN, Chi Yan / MINGUEZ, Juan / NG, Betty
This studio’s macro-scale context is the dynamic relationship between China's urban centres and its vast countryside. We will disown the simplistic notion of an "urban-rural divide" and instead study the territory as a continuous field of flows, shaped by state strategy, economic forces, and technological development. The countryside is not a static, pastoral backdrop but an active zone of transformation where the logics of urbanization are continually at play.
The official strategy of "urban-rural integration," first introduced in the 2014 National New-Type Urbanization Plan, provides the dominant framework for this transformation. This is not merely a policy, but a vast project of socio-spatial engineering designed to resolve persistent disparities in income and infrastructure, optimize resource allocation, and foster a "New-Type Urban-Rural Relationship”. The relationship is defined by a powerful, bidirectional current of resources. For decades, a surplus of rural labour has fuelled China's industrial growth and rapid urbanization. By 2024, China's urbanization rate reached 67%, with the urban population growing by millions annually as the rural population declined. Now, that flow is reversing in new forms. Urban centres have become sources of capital, technology, and innovation that are strategically injected back into the rural sphere to "revitalize" it. This revitalization often takes the form of new agricultural-industrial ventures.
The studio adopts the winery as its laboratory. The winery is a multi-scalar phenomenon where geology, biology, chemistry, economics, culture, technology, and policy converge. Through it, we trace the trajectories of life forms, materials, and capital connecting remote geographies to global circuits of consumption. The grapevine itself is a traveling technology, a biological agent with cultural, economic, and ecological histories layered across millennia.
Its first transfer into China came via the Silk Road in the 2nd century BC, when Han envoy Zhang Qian introduced Vitis vinifera to the imperial court. Wine remained a delicacy for elites, while grain alcohols dominated broader consumption. A later transfer occurred in the 19th century, when French missionaries brought vines to Yunnan’s valleys. These hybrid varieties, with obscured European origins, persist today, embedding colonial and religious histories into the local vine. The vine in our site of study is therefore a living artifact, a testament to ancient trade routes, imperial ambitions, and colonial-era religious expansion. The concept of "terroir" offers a counter-narrative to industrial standardization. In Yunnan, terroir, terroir emerges as an active collaboration among diverse actors—a parliament where soils, climates, microbes, farmers, and investors negotiate their existence.
In Yunnan, the defining characteristic of the region is its extreme geography, with vineyards at 2,200–2,900 meters that produce unique viticultural conditions: intense UV radiation, dramatic diurnal shifts, and long dry growing seasons shielded from monsoons by the Mountains. Unlike in China's other major wine regions, the winters are mild enough that vines do not need to be buried for protection, becomes a hugely significant factor in the labour and economics of viticulture.
This terroir is not a backdrop but a complex, cooperative condition of human and pan-organic life. The architectural task becomes is to design for the particular, resisting the generic. Our intervention must acknowledge and engage with the entire parliament of actors that co-produce the wine - geology, microbiology, labour, capital — transforming an agricultural practice into an observatory where global and local systems intersect.
