Xia Futouʹs 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. periment of the public bathhouseʹs 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 conception11The essence of self-organization or self-organizing system is that system structure often appears without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system. In other words, the constraints on form (i.e. organization) of interest to us are internal to the system, resulting from the interactions among the components and usually independent of the physical nature of those components. The organization can evolve in either time or space, maintain a stable form or show transient phenomena. General resource flows within self-organized systems are expected (dissipation), although not critical to the concept itself (Wu, 2001). ad 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.