Public Ground: In the Urban-Rural Continuum

To conclude her residency at ZAZ Bellerive, supported b the Chair, the Chinese architect Gong Chenxi presents her research and work on public space in semi-urbanised villages in China and Switzerland.

Six improvised questions, six improvised conversations

The event consists of an pop-up exhibition and a conversation game, where six invited practitioners who act in the urban-rural continuum bring one question each. Parts of their work is also on show, presenting different scales, different contexts, and different ways of thinking. The conversation game starts at 6:30 pm, the entry is free.

With Gong Chenxi, Atelier Wo-Land / China Academy of Art; Erik Fichter, Fichter+ / Chair Of Architectural Behaviorology ETH Zurich; Dorothee Hahn, Architecture of Territory ETH Zurich; Ludovica Molo, studio we architettura / Istituto Internazionale di Architettura, Lugano; Martino Pedrozzi, Studio d’Architettura Martino Pedrozzi, Mendrisio; Abigail Leigh Stoner, Schneider Stoner Architects, Luven.

Gong Chenxi is the founder of Atelier Wo-Land. Her Intervention in Yangshantou Village was shortlisted for both the Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award and AR Public Award. She understands the architect as a kind of anthropologist—someone whose practice is grounded in understanding for the sake of imagination. Her work unfolds in semi-urbanised villages, where governance, topography, and local agency collide to produce a built environment fractured by conflicting intentions and overlapping visions. Through site-specific interventions, analytical mapping, and teaching, she seeks to awaken perception and activate the often-overlooked ties between space, landscape, history, and collective life.

Her current research asks: what changes—in aesthetics, spatial logic, and professional practice—when we replace the rural-urban dichotomy with a rural-urban continuum? She is particularly interested in how architects navigate between institutional structures and grassroots dynamics, and in the conceptual frameworks and value judgments that shape rural public spaces, infrastructure, and cultural landscapes. Rather than replicating existing models, she embeds herself into specific social mechanisms to understand how ideas, institutions, and built form shape one another.

For Gong Chenxi, architecture is an ongoing conversation between subject and land. That is what Wo-Land aspires to embody.

This residency is supported by the Swiss Arts Council, Pro Helvetia Shanghai.