Promoting a “Sustainable” Material: Prefabricated Concrete Rural Houses in Jiangsu Province, East China, 1961–80s

China currently produces and consumes more than half of the world’s cement, which leads to immense environmental consequences. However, it is not usually known that such consumption arises from the depletion of China’s staple construction material, timber, since the late 19th century. Since the early 1960s, concrete was deliberately promoted by the Chinese government in rural areas as a ‘sustainable’ substitute for timber. This, however, conflicted with aesthetics of timber architecture in traditional Chinese culture then still entrenched in those areas.

With analysis of contemporary architectural journals and publications and numerous fieldtrips in East China’s Jiangsu Province from 2021 to 2025, the research reveals the introduction and localization process of prefabricated rural houses in the province. Chinese architects initially copied European designs of prefabricated concrete buildings, but these were rejected by local farmers. However, the architects soon discovered that prefabricated concrete structures were compatible with traditional Chinese timber buildings, as the latter was also prefabricated. In the early 1970s, rural builders and artisans began to master the skills for concrete prefabrication and freely mixed concrete components with timber ones. After the 1978 economic reform, the aesthetics of traditional houses from 17th – 19th centuries were revived in some regions like Nantong. Rural artisans recreated traditional large timber houses in concrete, making them affordable to small businessmen, workers and even common farmers.

The scarcity of timber and the state promotion of concrete did not immediately make concrete the preferred building material in rural China, and concrete was popularized by technical and aesthetic innovations by architects and local artisans. This provides lessons for the adoption of new, environmentally friendly materials today, but also reveals the distressful fact that one generation’s ecological remedy can become the root of next generation’s ecological calamity.