ANCESTRAL HOUSING 2050
International Open Design Competition, Future Housing/ Regenerative Futures: AI Design Competition, SPACE10 Research and Design Lab + IKEA, Copenhagen, Denmark
By 2050 the dead may ‘live on’ as synthetic conversational AI, and we will ‘talk’ to our buildings. In China, the population is falling (by some estimates 66% to 2100) and ageing (over 65’s to double by 2050). Global warming will trigger sea level rise and east China is prone to flooding. This project argues for regenerating vacated towers as ‘ancestral housing’ buried within vertical-farming; future sustainable housing becoming a question of ‘housing’ the ‘passed’, to be visited by the living (to commune).
Today in China, villages are at times demolished due to flooding. We study the example of Boao Village (Wenzhou) (a village of recent concrete residential relocation towers, and a historic horizontal layer planned for demolition). The towers are without a courtyard (where villagers traditionally grew food), and without the socialisation of village streets. Boao is settled around mountains, and here the dead are buried in concrete feng-shui tombs. Policy is now that new tombs are not permitted so as to conserve land. Future flooding would destroy fertile land. Sustainable housing in China is about housing the dead more-so than the living.
Housing will enter a new age for the Chinese, with the ageing population and the predicted ancestral-housing of synthetic-humans. Sustainable housing is only partly about housing-the-living, it is also about housing-the-dead (and caring for the mental-health of the infirm). Flooding of villages in East China may be met with resilience; the regeneration of the Chinese water-village in a silicone-future of non-polluted water. As through history, people will choose to live among and commune with their passed-family, and this could happen through regeneration rather than new tomb constructions.
Global warming has triggered sea level rise and low-lying villages such as Boao could be ceded to rising water in the future. The Chinese have lived for centuries in water-villages, and instead of abandon Boao, this village can find resilience through regeneration. With the Chinese population ageing and falling there will be large infrastructures of tombs and ancestral housing to construct, and at the same time, 66% vacant housing space. The elderly population of Boao commune with passed relatives, visiting tombs and ancestral housing weekly. AI is set to expand this, through the emergence of synthetic ancestors and the ideas of housing them.
Rather than demolish the future vacant and flooded concrete towers of Boao, we regenerate them as vertical urban-farming infrastructure and as a new form of housing; that of a combination of adaptive-reuse ancestral-housing (offsetting the construction of new tombs) and a living structure, where the act of memorial itself is meshed with a bamboo communal growing structure, able to support other types of planting and farming. Regeneration is approached as a question technological (living-structure), spatial (regenerating empty space), and social (regenerating ancestral worship in an age of AI and the sustainable-housing implication of this).
Sustainable housing in east China is only partly about housing the living, it is also about housing synthetic humans in relation to the living, and feeding the living in relation to future flooding. The interiors of the future-vacant relocation-towers of Boao are regenerated as ancestral-homes for synthetic-humans; living villagers practicing weekly ancestral-communion in a new age of housing. The act of burial can be regeneration itself; the Chinese practice of tree burial inspiring the idea of ancestral homes sustaining a living structure growing from vacant concrete towers.
Design process and use of AI: we started by photographing Boao Village; spaces, materials and details; categorising these; then training a series of LoRA models (Low-Rank Adaptation), and through a latent diffusion model, generated future-flooded scenarios specific to Boao. We then regenerated our own past future-housing and livingstructure projects, collaging these into the scenarios using human architectural-intelligence, generating new images, and these formed the basis for a second latent diffusion model process with text prompting to create the final images. Other images were made in fully through text prompting alone. Through the process, we have referenced ourselves as architects, by regenerating past housing and landscape projects we designed, used as image-prompting. Further, we referenced the actual spatial and material context of Boao (employing the village itself as a ‘creator’ through our process of photography and training LoRA models). Throughout we have tried to follow methods that avoids the generic and the determined, so as to be specific and meaningful to a situation, controlling but also accommodating the surprise and challenge of working with AI creative tools.
Credits:
David Vardy, Xu Jiayi, Lin Yixuan, Li Yuche