The rapid urbanization in China has drastically reshaped numerous rural communities, where their inhabitants' means of sustenance and cultural values were often lost. One such case is the transformation of thousands of acres of farmland into a lakefront district of planned zones of dense housing, working, and recreation in Hefei, which displaced farming families from their villages during construction. The development ended in bankruptcy and abandonment of major office towers.

“Towers of Skywells” proposes to repurpose these abandoned towers into a new type of dwellings for the displaced rural population through adapting a historic vernacular typology - a two-story house with a skywell. The skywell is a small courtyard that not only draws light and passively cools the house, but acts as a connector to adjacent units. When aggregated, these homes form a shared living environment for various family structures. As a basic module, the historic house is repeated on existing tower structures, creating an array of interconnected two-story units that blend communal and private spaces. A continuous band of unconditioned space ties the units together, sponsoring recreation, production, and planting. This part-to-whole relationship increases in scale, grouping two sets of two floors to form communities sharing programs in the building core. These communities are separated by levels housing larger collective programs for the entire buildings.

In opposition to the principles of homogeneous density and separation of working and living promoted by the modernist towers, the project reinterprets and allows enduring values such as familial ties and communal collectivism to manifest in built space. In doing so, it amends the broken link in the architectural lineage of the region and suggests a way forward for continuing the cultural heritage of collective living for the local community.