Date 01.06.2021

Location Hunan, China

The “Mutating House: A Dwelling that Builds a Community” project designed by Condition_Lab, the design research laboratory led by Prof. Peter Ferretto, has won the Future Project Awards 2021 in the residential category.

This proposal, focusing on the Dong Minority community in Hunan, China, investigates the feasibility to build an alternative timber house typology and creates a design template for a self-build dwelling from prefabricated timber components addressing the critical issues currently facing the Dong community. For centuries the Dong communities have been almost entirely self-sufficient, with the environment in which they lived being a measure of their living standard. Yet traditional Dong timber houses will soon no longer be built, replaced by a hybrid concrete pastiche utterly foreign to the territory. Rather than yielding to this trend, this research seeks to propose an alternative solution in the form of a pilot prototype house. Material technology and self-build initiatives could become the catalyst for regenerating the house typology and simultaneously creating an alternative industry as a source of income for the community.

The Future Projects Awards is an award programme celebrating excellence in unbuilt or incomplete projects, organised and awarded annually by the MIPIM (Le marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier) in Cannes, France, in cooperation with the monthly international magazine The Architectural Review.