Xia Futou's public bathhouse--a sustainable urbanization experiment in a Chinese village

Xia Futou, a small Chinese village with a unique cultural landscape, consists of two unbalanced parts, an old village up the hill and a new one down the hill. In order to upgrade and preserve the unique cultural landscape of the older village and rebalance the dislocation of the two parts, a small public bathhouse project has been carried out according to sustainable architecture principles. Based on the current cultural landscape of the bathhouse and its surroundings, this approach is attempting to localize an informed, balance-seeking, design process in the village and in so doing develop a series of diverse possibilities and beneficial paths. The experiment of the public bathhouse's design and construction led to two key conceptual questions that need to be examined, the one is to research a village with a dynamic system conception instead of a static one; the other is to research a village with a self-organizing system conception1 instead of an organized one. Furthermore, we can give the sustainable path for the future that such naturally evolved Chinese villages evolve into sustainable towns and cities.