A forgotten square becomes the new spiritual pulse of Fengwu Village, where traditional materials and modern design intertwine to resurrect memory, activate community, and challenge the conventions of rural revitalization.
Photography: Huien Song, Ziyi Liu, Yi Huang, Jingqiu Zhang, Team of Yizhe Zhang
Amid the misty hills and rolling greenery of southern Anhui, the timeworn paths of Fengwu Village are no longer just relics of the past, they’re roads to a reimagined future. The FW JI· Rural Memory Museum isn’t simply a new structure in an aging village. It’s a radical act of remembrance. A space that doesn’t archive history behind glass, but resurrects it in motion, through architecture, emotion and everyday rituals.
The site, once home to Yingfengli, a building that quietly faded from memory, is now a defiant reawakening. The village square that remained, little more than a place to dry meat or hang laundry, was underused, untouched by the rhythm of community life.
That disconnection has been flipped on its head. IARA’s design overlays history with presence, drawing from local materials and ancestral forms, reinterpreting vernacular structures into bold, layered expressions of rural identity.
The Poetry of Rural Design
Charred wood evokes endurance. Lime-washed walls echo tradition. Courtyard layouts reverse the usual logic, embracing outward spatiality over inward retreat. The result? An architecture that sings both in ancestral tones and contemporary riffs. And it’s not just about aesthetics, it’s about social texture.
Before the museum was officially completed, villagers instinctively began to use the semi-open ground floor for community feasts. No plaque. No invitation. Just life. That kind of spontaneous adoption can’t be designed, it happens when people feel seen and included; it’s the clearest validation of design meeting real human need.
The second floor tells three stories: past, present, and projection.
The Rural Memory Hall gathers fragments of village life, births, growth, inheritances, and threads them into a tactile, emotional tapestry. The Future Hall opens onto glass-framed landscapes, suggesting hope not as distant possibility, but as nearby familiarity. And then there’s the “Time Box”, a tiny black cube of charred wood, lit by a single hanging bulb, holding the essence of the village like a flame in darkness. It’s not high-tech. It’s human and steeped in feeling.
IARA’s approach, rooted in social realism, stretches far beyond architecture. It’s a philosophy of embedded design, a way of creating spaces that don’t impose but invite, that listen before they speak. Through the interplay of tradition and invention, they’ve activated Fengwu, making it a canvas of communal memory and shared ambition. This project isn’t just a revival, it’s a renaissance born in the cracks of rural neglect.
Designing the Future Through the Past
The Rural Memory Museum doesn’t glorify the heroic or monumental. It elevates the ordinary. It serves as a venue for weddings and funerals, for festivals and leisure, a fluid space where architecture becomes part of life’s natural rhythm.
It understands that memory is not static, it pulses, it evolves. And it dares to ask: What if buildings could remember? What if design could heal?
Here, heritage isn’t an artifact, it’s alive. It’s on the walls, under the feet, in the flicker of a bulb inside the Time Box. It’s the laughter during a feast, the silence before a documentary screening, the quiet pride of villagers walking through a space that reflects them, —not idealized, but actual. This is not nostalgia. It’s continuity with courage.
(Note: In the context of the Rural Memory Museum project in Fengwu Village, Yingfengli refers to a former building that once stood at the heart of the village. Over time, it gradually disappeared, leaving behind a modest public square that was underutilized due to the local climate and lack of shelter.)