Guest People
Instructor: Ingeborg Rocker · Partner: Lavender Kring
Priori
The project is sited at a Hakka indenture museum. Hakka translates literally as guest people, a name given to a nomadic Han Chinese ethnic group who migrated across southern China and eventually throughout Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The museum holds the history of their displacement and labor. The site itself is built from the masonry traditions the Hakka carried with them, stone construction techniques that show up in everything from their walled village compounds to the retaining walls terracing the hillside fields.
Posteriori
The goal was to design an intervention that felt like a genuine addition to the site rather than an imposition on it. We chose an overlook positioned above the valley, drawing on the masonry traditions we had studied and on the logic of the terraced agricultural fields that originally shaped the landscape. The structure grows from the ground it sits on.
