The art installation Floating House by Drawing Architecture Studio focuses on the formation, fragility, and self-organized order of Suzhou's old houses. Founding partner Li Han, operating at the intersection of architectural practice and artistic creation, examines the construction and daily life of Suzhou's vernacular dwellings, artistically recreating the bottom-up architectural vitality of ordinary residents. Through an architect's lens, Li contextualizes the countless improvisations of self-built houses within architectural discourse; as an artist, he uses humble materials to reinterpret the spontaneous beauty of grassroots structures.
Li Han has described Drawing Architecture Studio's methodology as akin to the fragmented storytelling of oral history, providing a vivid visual narrative for the constantly disappearing folk architecture. The continuous observation, documentation, presentation, and transformation are in line with the concept of "listening—filling in the blanks" in oral history. Before the invention of writing, human experience and knowledge were spread and inherited through oral transmission, forming an oral tradition. Since the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), it has been a method of historical research. In modern academia, oral history provides a critical alternative to traditional archives, amplifying "the voice of the past" and centering "history from below", empowering ordinary people to share their stories. Similarly, Floating House provokes reflection on social memory amid urbanization by depicting Suzhou's humble dwellings.
In this oral history workshop, we will be grounded in the city of Suzhou, guiding the public to experience the oral history workflow through the spatial dimension of Suzhou residents' "homes". Participants, as narrators, will use place-based storytelling to access deeper experiences and emotions. By integrating personal life narratives with collages of living spaces, memory and space are interconnected to evoke our shared impressions of Suzhou, uncovering the similarities and differences between individual and collective memories, while providing clues for future urban development. Through revisiting individual memories of family spaces in Suzhou, we explore the collective memory of old Suzhou houses across generations.
