Public
By Jen Lin-Liu
Until recently, the Naxi minority community living in Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northwest Yunnan Province, had no formal public gathering places. “They met in open spaces,” says architect Li Xiaodong, also a professor at Tsinghua University. But now the Yuhu Elementary School and Community Center provides a handsome courtyard and a long covered porch where residents can socialize, perform traditional dances, and even mount exhibitions. The complex encompasses a pair of two-story classroom blocks for 160 students and a separate community hall with gallery spaces.
The project reinterprets typical Naxi design elements with a modern sensibility. Instead of the usual Naxi quadrangle house, the project arranges its three blocks in a Z-shaped plan. Traditional curved roof ridges have been straightened, while old-styled gable-end ornamentations have been simplified into timber lattice frames. Traditional Naxi houses have small windows, but Li used larger glass panes to increase daylight inside and built a reflecting pool in the courtyard as a nod to the important role of water in Naxi culture.
Li also modified certain vernacular elements to help the buildings resist earthquakes. So he reinforced stone walls with steel rebar and wire mesh and made foundations with cement rather than stone. Li did use some traditional elements, such as grey clay roof tiles and the division of internal spaces into orthogonal bays.
Li undertook the project while a professor at the National University of Singapore and approached it as a design and researching job. He and several of his students conducted studies of local traditions, building materials, and construction technologies before starting to design.
The site, which was donated by a local villager, lies adjacent to the former residence of the Austrian-American botanist and National Geographic journalist Joseph Francis Charles Rock.
While the Lee Foundation and the Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts helped fund the $40,000 project, local participation was essential. Li and one of his doctoral students supervised a team of 50 local villagers—farmers not construction workers—to build the project. Although the villagers were unskilled in construction and couldn’t read drawings, Li was satisfied with the results. Working in a poor, remote area, Li often had to improvise. For example, when he had trouble acquiring timber for the project, he relied on his connections with local officials who allowed him to buy a confiscated supply of illegally logged wood. But the biggest challenge was working through the SARS epidemic, which struck in the spring of 2003. Though several of his students who had planned to visit the site had to cancel their trips, Li was able to finish the project in time—a big achievement during a time when much of China was shut down.
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