Since 2001, more than 370,000 rural schools in China have closed. Each closure erases daily rituals, social cohesion, and spatial identity. This project reimagines an abandoned primary school in Hongguang Village, Zunyi, Guizhou as a senior nursery for the people who once studied there as children.
Referencing Ilya Kabakov’s School No. 6,and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the building takes on the role of the Piper—provoking, luring, and awakening. The story reveals a state of liminality as children become adults and it shows the dilemmas the piper is facing. The piper could be an evoker and have this capability to raise the awareness of the children or the rats but he is weak in the adult world without power, resources and other companions. The Architecture could be an approach that embraces conflict, memory, and playfulness to provoke awakening and resist control. It challenges the viewer to see architecture not as a passive structure, but as an active force of creativity, disruption, and revelation — like the piper. Or the music that lures you. Escape can also be a return.
The design employs a dreamcore aesthetic, integrating fragments of the original modernist building with new insertions. Each room’s colors, furniture arrangement, and atmosphere connect with the journey of the story. In the end, the terrace garden could be an escape, but also a return. Physical models and detail studies. Close‑ups.
Kids Return. Due to centralized education reforms and urban migration, more than 370,000 rural schools in China have closed since 2001. Each closure erases daily rituals, social cohesion, and spatial identity. This thesis reimagines one such school in Hongguang Village, Zunyi, Guizhou—abandoned after only nine years of use—as a senior nursery for the very people who once studied there as children.
The project draws from Ilya Kabakov’s School No. 6, which renders memory through fragmented space, and from the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, where children vanish to an unseen destination. Here, the architecture itself becomes the Piper—provoking, luring, and awakening. Escape can also be a return; disappearance becomes transformation.
The design employs a dreamcore aesthetic, integrating fragments of the original modernist building with new insertions. Existing classrooms are reconfigured into a library, reception, café, and courtyard. The upper floors host an auditorium, music and dance rooms, nap spaces, and a rooftop farm. A new bathhouse, connected to a central core, doubles as a therapeutic retreat, while a circular “adults’ tower” accommodates administration and security.
Each space is choreographed like a track in a concept album—its colors, textures, and light quality shaping the atmosphere of a specific scene. Together, they form a journey that mirrors the Piper’s path, leading visitors through moments of play, contemplation, and encounter.
The design stages a continuing journey of the pipers and the children. We enter the senior nursery through patterned-brick hallways where sunlight and shadow weave across the path. Another narrative thread of the rats starting from “rats square”; moves through the library, reception, and café around a tranquil courtyard; ascending to an auditorium, music and dance rooms, nap spaces, and a rooftop farm; culminating in a bathhouse and terrace garden—a space that might be an ending, or a beginning. Here, Escape can also be a return.
Architecture is closely intertwined with “people”, yet people forget what they were. The story reveals a state of liminality as children become adults, showing the dilemmas the Piper faces. The Piper can awaken awareness in children or even rats, yet is powerless in the adult world without resources, allies, or authority. Here, architecture embraces conflict, memory, and playfulness to provoke awakening and resist control. It challenges the viewer to see architecture not as a passive container, but as an active force of creativity, disruption, and revelation—like the Piper, or the music that lures you.
The thesis was the first entrance.
Kids Return is an ongoing artistic research and an expanding narrative world. What began with an abandoned rural school has gradually escaped the boundaries of a single building.
Architecture, moving image, music, AI, installation, games, and fiction now become different entrances into the world.
The abandoned school remains its origin: a place suspended between disappearance and remembrance. Instead of preserving them as monuments, I am interested in imagining what they could become if architecture were allowed to dream.
Inspired by Pink Floyd and the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Kids Return reinterprets the Piper not as a villain, but as an evoker—a figure who invites us to question the structures we have inherited. The Piper continues to move through this world—not necessarily as a person, but as a recurring force. A piece of music can be the Piper. A building can be the Piper. A dream, an image, a game, or an encounter can become the Piper whenever it interrupts what we have learned to accept and calls us somewhere else.
Escape can also be a return.
Return is not nostalgia. Not a return to childhood, but a return to curiosity, vulnerability, play, and the freedom to imagine before we learned to conform.
AI enters this world not merely as a production tool, but as another instrument to boost the imagination. It allows architecture to unfold as cinema, memory to become landscape, and fiction to become spatial experience. Things that cannot—or perhaps should not—exist as conventional buildings can temporarily acquire form.
Kids Return is therefore not a single project or a completed work. It is an expanding universe—one that continually asks how architecture might become an active force of resistance, imagination, and emotional reconstruction.
A building may become a film. A film may become a song. A memory may become a landscape, an installation, a game, or a place that never existed.
The thesis was the first entrance.
The world continues beyond it.
The moving-image work extends Kids Return beyond architectural representation. Rather than illustrating a finished building, the film treats architecture as a temporal medium: a sequence of atmospheres, memories, encounters, and impossible transitions.
AI becomes an extension of this research rather than merely a production tool. It allows architecture to unfold as cinema, memory as landscape, and fiction as spatial experience. Through AI, I explore impossible worlds where architecture becomes narrative, dreams become inhabitable, and memory remains unfinished.
Yian “Yay” Li is a Los Angeles–based visual artist and spatial storyteller working across architecture, moving image, AI, installation, exhibition, and scenography. Yian's practice explores how environments can evoke emotional and psychological experiences.
Rather than treating architecture as purely functional structures, yian approaches space as a storytelling medium. Many of the projects focus on themes of childhood memory, imagination, and the invisible traces that people leave in places. Through drawings, installations, and speculative architectural proposals, yian constructs environments where fragments of narrative unfold through atmosphere, sound, and spatial perception. The work moves between physical models, cinematic imagery, sound, drawing, and generative workflows, with recurring interests in memory, childhood, dream logic, public space, and environmental storytelling.
Recent work explores the relationship between sound and architecture, imagining buildings as instruments that can echo memories and emotions. In these projects, space becomes an active participant in storytelling—whispering, resonating, and revealing hidden layers of experience. Yian’s practice seeks to create poetic spatial environments that invite reflection, curiosity, and emotional engagement.
Kids Return continues this research as an expanding world in which architecture becomes a form of storytelling—moving between reality and fiction, built space and moving image, disappearance and return.