The terraced rice fields of Yuanyang, in Yunnan Province, China, have been maintained and rebuilt continuously for more than 1,300 years. Designed to capture water flowing from mountaintops for natural irrigation, the terraces transform the steep walls of the Hong river valley into a gentle slope. This resilient geoengineering project has sustained rice production season after season for centuries. The traditional home to the Hani and Ifugao people, the area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2013 in recognition of its significant “cultural landscape.” Today, stunning vistas of the fields, which are enclosed by earthen barriers that follow the topography of the mountains, attract visitors from around the world.

For Zhang Ke, Aga Khan Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the ancient traditions of shaping the landscape at Yuanyang offer a point of departure for contemporary architecture. The terraces demonstrate “how agricultural landscape and natural landscape merge together,” he says. The earthworks were “created using local materials and then embedded in the landscape without intruding.” Zhang Ke sees the fields as a time-tested way of living in sync with the environment, embodying a concept he calls Earth-Dwelling.
Earth, for our ancestors, contemporaries, and future generations alike, means also one of the most basic and sustainable materials for building
Zhang Ke

Zhang Ke, who received his MArch from the GSD in 1998, recently led an option studio that travelled to Yuanyang with the brief to develop not just architecture that responded to the spectacular landscape, but a program inspired by Earth-Dwelling that might enhance the area for residents and tourists alike. The founder of ZAO, Zhang Ke has explored related notions with GSD students previously in a 2017 option studio focused on Tibet. More recently, he has been drawn to Yuanyang for a collaboration with the Avant-Garde Library, an institution known in China for occupying daring architectural spaces, including a building in nearby Mengzi that Zhang Ke completed in 2021.

Zhang Ke’s design for a branch of the library in Yuanyang is a low-slung structure, the shape of which evokes the organic lines of the terraced fields. When completed, it will look and feel integrated with the earthen rice terraces, in part because Zhang Ke has chosen to work with rammed earth. “There’s a material continuation, but it’s clearly contemporary,” he said. “The standpoint is not to imitate but to invent.” More than proscribing the use of any material, Earth-Dwelling, as Zhang Ke defines it, specifies attentiveness to environmental conditions at different scales, an interlocking approach to fostering global sustainability, community development, and, with a nod to Heidegger, creative modes of life grounded in the physical experience of a place.

This perspective guided the fall 2024 research trip, which afforded a unique opportunity for GSD students to work in a rural setting with a delicate ecosystem and deep cultural roots.

“It just seemed so natural to terrace a mountain face and use the water from up on the hillside,” recalled Lucas Almassy (MArch ’26) of his impressions of the area. “It made sense for me immediately. I would live there or anywhere similar.” Inspired by the landscape, Almassy found himself sketching “constantly” on the trip. “I didn’t know what I was really drawing, but I knew it was assemblages of stones and bricks. And as I was drawing, I realized I was drawing tables and chairs and benches growing out of the earth.” These preliminary drawings, and a later series of large-scale paintings, informed a proposal for a library, which Almassy describes as “social infrastructure” designed as a common space for members of existing communities in the area and visitors.
Guided by Zhang Ke, the studio met with local leaders and residents of the villages in the area, offering a chance to “see the land through the eyes of the people that live there,” says Abby Kuohn (MArch ’25). This consultation was especially critical because Zhang Ke tasked students with developing a program that could both benefit residents and offer a model for sustainable tourism. The ancient landscape of Yuanyang has, in recent years, been subject to contemporary social forces. While the UNESCO designation protected Yuanyang, it also guaranteed the arrival of mass tourism. A new airport under construction nearby promises to accelerate the growth of the tourist economy by allowing travelers to bypass the provincial capital of Kunming, a four-hour drive away.

For Zhang Ke, architects must be proactive in addressing both the built environment and such changing social realities. His engagement with Yuanyang aims to help “increase the income of local communities . . . without losing a detached view of the potential consequences of tourism.”

In his project, Peihao Jin (MArch II ’26) grappled the contradictory tendencies for tourism to increase awareness of local cultures while also threatening to degrade them. Noting a strong tradition of bamboo weaving in the area, especially among elder members of the community—“grandma and grandpa”, as he put it— Jin envisioned a pavilion to enclose a central square in a main village. Jin’s design for a dramatic thatch roof spanning the entire square would afford some protection from the elements while focusing views of the rice terraces. Offering an inviting space for both weavers and tourists, the structure would also employ local materials—rice straw thatching—that would effectively sustain the traditional technique by virtue of needing to be replaced on a three to five-year cycle.


The agricultural economy of the area also informed the work of Aakash Dave (MAUD ’25), whose design for a rice noodle production facility employs rammed earth structures. “Earth was the biggest influence for my intervention,” he says, pointing both to the demonstration of rammed earth techniques that the studio witnessed at the site of Zhang Ke’s library as well as modes of building from his home country of India. Dave’s project also drew upon a careful study of how villagers used spaces between buildings for various stages of processing rice and byproducts, as well as the flow of water through both agricultural fields and dwellings. The spaces he created are meant to facilitate the traditional production of high-quality noodles using the red rice varietals for which Yuanyang is famous.

In addition to tourists, Zhang Ke says that rural areas like Yuanyang are also experiencing a more localized renewal. Following decades of intense urbanization in China, ambitious young people who might have once left villages for cities are returning home. Many are interested in preserving customs, like rice noodle manufacturing, while adding value. Traditional buildings are also being reconsidered. “Because of decades of demolition,” says Zhang Ke, such structures “are suddenly rare resources”. Indeed, a rural analogue to Zhang Ke’s work reimagining traditional hutongs in Beijing, for which he is well known, and ongoing projects to rehabilitate languishing villages.

While villages in Yuanyang appear to follow traditional construction techniques, with prominent thatched roofs, most are, in fact, recent reconstructions. Through a government initiative, many village buildings that had previously employed rammed earth were reconstructed from concrete, but made to resemble older structures. Still, ruins of previous villages exist in the area, and the studio hiked to one cluster of buildings with a commanding view of the valley.

Kuohn selected this site for her project, which engages with traditional water systems. “One of the things that I found captivating about this area was how powerful and intricately engineered the water system was,” she says, observing how residents “constructed their dwellings in the villages all the way through the rice terraces themselves, and then down to the river. Without the water system, the entire ecosystem of the area wouldn’t work.” Kuohn devised a bathhouse that makes use of a peak-spanning bridge structure. Celebrating the central place of water in the community and offering a counter to its association with agricultural work, her proposal invites residents and tourists to find a source of rejuvenation.

“Earth, for our ancestors, contemporaries, and future generations alike, means also one of the most basic and sustainable materials for building,” Zhang Ke wrote in a description of the course prior to final reviews of the projects. Though many found inspiration in a broader conception of Earth-Dwelling and made use of a variety of materials, students strove to articulate connection to lifeways that predate us and possibly extend beyond our own time.