Rural areas are home to 70% of the world’s population. Confronted with entirely new technology, materials and construction techniques as well as entirely different forms of social organization and systems of value, peasants are forced to rely on limited trial-and-error methods to accumulate experience. Everywhere from north to south the ubiquitous cinderblock houses– entirely vulnerable to earthquakes, heavily energy intensive and costly. In facing current issues of sustainable development, Hsieh Yingchun traveled to rural areas in Hebei, Henan and Anhui in 2004 to promote cooperative construction of sustainable homes in the countryside as an integration of rural social and economic conditions. 

1. Earth House 001 - North China Folk Home (Han ethnicity) 

Located within the Yan Yangchu Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zhaicheng Village (under Dingzhou City) inHebei Province, World Room 001 is a model ‘green’ home jointly constructed by villagers and undergraduate architecture students.  It is a two-storey, three-room building with a wooden frame and adobe walls.  Work on the interior used and expanded upon traditional methods for creating a double-level energy-conserving kang [a heated earthen platformbed found in homes across north China] suitable for a two-storey home. The building is not only earthquake resistant, but also has excellent heat-conserving capabilities; in summer, the interior temperature can be kept as low as 10 degrees Celsius. 

2. Earth House 003 - cooperative building in Lankao, Henan (Han ethnicity)

A ‘green’ architecture workcamp was organized in partnership with the local cooperative to promote intersubjective thinking in architectural construction. The camp brought together surplus rural labor power, encouraged mutual aid and work exchange among community members for home construction. They vastly reduced reliance on currency, and employed locally-sourced and salvaged materials and other such resource-conserving measures for constructing their ‘green’ rural homes.