Nanjing Lishui Guoxing Village Unthought Nature School

Against China's rural-revitalization strategy, which calls for thriving industries, ecological living, civilized rural mores, effective governance and prosperous life, rural depopulation is a shared problem worldwide. The most promising response is to attract urban residents, and especially children, to the countryside. From this arose the plan to create one of China's largest children's nature-school campuses. Working with the Lishui District government and Lishui Business-Travel Group, the team chose Guoxing Village at the foot of Wuxiang Mountain in Nanjing. The name Wuxiang, no thought, has a 1,200-year history: the Five Dynasties statesman and writer Han Xizai (902-970) built a retreat here and, drawing on Buddhist non-self thought, renamed the mountain Wuxiang. The mountain's Wuxiang Temple was one of the four hundred eighty temples of the Southern Dynasties, and the Northern Song poet Zhou Bangyan, as county magistrate of Lishui, wrote his famous Man Ting Fang here. The 20-square-kilometer area became a national forest park in 2015. Guoxing Village is converted into the Wuxiang Nature School campus, led by agricultural landscape: the existing village is renovated into school buildings, and rural earth-art landscape is used to engage children. The project treats the village not as a preserved museum but as a working landscape in which children farm, observe, build and learn, and where rural-revitalization goals are met through education rather than real estate. The design is by Yiya Yuanjing.