Friday 10 January 2025 – the deadline for all the residents in the public housing to move out from Mr Shen’s House – indicates the end of the house serving as a residence for almost two hundred years. Mr Shen’s House, located northwest of downtown Suzhou in San Mao Guan Alley, has been occupied by several generations of residents over the past hundred years. Employing the micro-historical method, the thesis seeks dialogues across multiple scales of space and time – linking spaces of everyday life to broader city transformations and histories and connecting the present with layered moments of the past. Meanwhile, the specific complex of houses in the historical district of Suzhou is not only the research subject, but also becomes a methodological site – a spatial and narrative device through which multiple theoretical arguments, temporal fragments and material conditions are tested, unfolded and situated. Structured around four episodes, the thesis experiments with four attempts to interpret Mr Shen’s House: housing legislation, urban transformations and domestic ecologies; myths and realities of the water in the organisation of the house and the city; entangled materialities and cultures; and household appliances, global cultural exchange and domestic modernity.

Jiayi Wang is a PhD candidate in Architectural History and Theory at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She holds a BFA in Product Design from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she focused on contemporary applications of traditional handicrafts, and an MDes in Interior Architecture (Adaptive Reuse) from the Rhode Island School of Design.