Shillong Village, Yunnan, China

Anderson Anderson Architecture and Atelier FUN Architectural Design and Consultants have created the Linden Centre Shaxi Community Campus, designed for traditional local skills in rammed earth, timber, stone, and tile intending to jump-start new local job opportunities, in the high mountains of Yunnan, southwest China.

The campus contains community and cultural facilities as well as small dwelling cabins for visitors involved in economic development and cultural education.

The project is funded by the governmental Development-Oriented Poverty Reduction Program for Rural China, developed and managed by The Linden Centre, a local cultural and environmental education program.

The Linden Centre Shaxi Community Campus has recently been awarded a 2023 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The remote village of Shillong has been largely untouched by modern development, maintaining a traditional logging, hunting, grazing, and subsistence agriculture economy.

The population is predominantly Bai ethnic minority, with rich traditions of craft and culture, including in communal construction of buildings.

For ecological reasons, logging, hunting, and grazing are no longer tenable in the park, and the community was expected to shift into tourism support, displacing cultural roots but expected to maintaining the scenic charm.

The Linden Centre and its architecture team proposed an alternate vision, with the community maintaining traditional production skills to provide education and cultural sharing with visitors while merging traditional craft with technical learning to obtain higher-wage construction work in the region.

To achieve this the design uses local materials, craft traditions, and community labor while also meeting international building standards and safety requirements, requiring a great deal of design team advocacy and invention to provide appropriate integration of tradition with modern technology.

Although Shilong village is a remarkable work of building craft within a beautiful natural ecosystem, the site was marred by two major scars: the recent construction of a water reservoir and underground pipeline and surrounding meadows disrupted by grazing cattle carving muddy swaths of erosion.

On the first site visit, the architects were presented with a remarkable mandate: ”Please stake out the most beautiful site for the project, anywhere you like.”

Followed by the mayor’s team wielding hatchets and sharpened stakes, the architects were pressed to establish the location and perimeter of construction.

It was not considered auspicious that the architects became more interested in the pipeline and grazing scars than the more pristine land.

On the other hand, it became clear that envisioning an environmentally sensitive project within a beautiful landscape required dealing with these massive scars.

The architects quickly decided to build inside the scars, looking outward onto undisturbed earth.

The building site was staked to straddle the straight slash of pipeline excavation, dividing an open grazing area to the east of the pipeline ravine from wilder animal paths carved terraces into the forested hillside to the west.

Driving a great many stakes, the architects scribbled rude maps as the architects walked.

A survey team followed, committing to digital accuracy to this strange array of unexpectedly many points.

The resulting design preserves a pristine landscape, corrects existing scars, and without artifice, obtains an organic formal logic and spatial variety not unlike traditional village construction shaped over time by happenstance, weather, and daily life.

The form and layout of the project were established, and the architects studied the local ways of building, working with craftspeople to adapt traditional techniques to contemporary standards and building codes.

For centuries Shilong villagers have worked together as a community team to build and repair.

Of greatest importance to the architects was the traditional stone ground plane constructed as a shared platform aggregating communal space with individual buildings.

This stone plinth infrastructure is fundamental to the form and public experience of local villages.

The stone groundwork of the new campus wanders and fills scarred spaces of the site, creating terraces, streets, courtyards, drainage courses, and foundations, serving as plinths for the more fragile constructions of rammed earth and timber.

A timber bridge springs from the stone on both sides of the artificial pipeline ravine connecting two distinct campus zones: on the east as cultural facilities, dining, and gathering spaces; on the wooded west side of the ravine as rammed earth dwelling clusters nestled along lines carved over time by wandering cattle.

Project: The Linden Centre Shaxi Community Campus
Architects: Anderson Anderson Architecture and Atelier FUN Architectural Design and Consultants Co., Ltd.
Design Team: Mark Anderson, Peter Anderson, Mengxi Wu, Ao Ziang, Yafei Li, Jieh Jia Tan, Reem Makkawi, Johnson Tang, Liang Xiaolong, Richard Kuo, Zachary Streitz, Weiwei Wang, Emma Luo, Xiao Long Liang, Ju Liu, and Yabei Wang
Associate Architects: Yunnan Design Institute Group Co., Ltd.
Associate Architect Team: Yuxuan Shi, Yixuan Zhao, and Jun Wang
Consultants: Yunnan Design Institute Group Co., Ltd, Shi Yuxuan, Wang Jun, Wang Zheng, Zhao Yixuan, and Zhao Shichang
General Contractor: Xingzhang Xiongjian Construction Co., Ltd.
Client: Linden Centre (Shanghai) Culture Development Co., Ltd.
Photographers: Zhang Yangyang, Anderson Anderson Architecture, Mengxi Wu, Yujiang Mou