Dollhouse Of The Future | One-child Policy

To celebrate the opening of the House of Madison, The Madison Group invited some of our leading architects and designers to experiment, play, and inspire us with their vision of the future of home living through their creation of bespoke dollhouses.

Neri&Hu’s ONE CHILD POLICY DOLLHOUSE is a picture of the modern Chinese family: father, mother, and child – trapped in close quarters. After three decades, China’s controversial one-child policy has all but been reversed, and yet what is clear is that the consequences it bears on the generations to come are irreversible. Recent survey shows that any families are still choosing not to have more children due to the cost of living impact. With housing prices skyrocketing in urban areas, traditional multi-generational households are improbable, and so the dilemma persists – the issues of skewed gender demographics, “little emperor” syndrome, the burden of elderly care and decline of labor forces. At the same time, China is also experiencing an unprecedented growth, giving rise to a powerful and moneyed class, whose vast wealth and excessive spending are leading towards yet another kind of cultural deterioration. These ongoing socio-economic problems, more blatant than ever, beg us to ask: can we ever really escape the gilded cages we have built for ourselves?