Tonglugu Mountain She Nationality Township Pioneer Yunxi Library

The Xianfeng Yunxi Library is located in Daijia Mountain village, E She She Ethnic Township, Tonglu County, Zhejiang. It is the eleventh bookstore opened by Xianfeng Bookstore. With the cultural mission of Xianfeng and the unique natural and cultural landscape of the She ethnic mountain village, the library has become a public-life link between local villagers and out-of-town readers, and a focus point for local cultural and creative industries. The main body of the library is an idle courtyard on one side of the village main street, comprising two yellow adobe houses and a platform that projects out from the sloping ground. The architectural design preserves the structural and spatial order of the houses and courtyard, restoring the dilapidated condition to a healthy state. The relationship between new and old reinforces a sense of temporality; the adobe walls, tile roofs and old timber frames, as carriers of time and memory, become the dominant spatial elements, and together with the public nature of the functional regeneration they create a contemporary rural aesthetics of cultural continuity. China's traditional roots over thousands of years lie in agricultural civilisation. The architectural tradition that truly belongs to China lies in rural settlements, in the organic whole of urban-rural relations, and in the continuing development mode of thousands of years, a regionality of cultural self-awareness. Our thinking focuses on the basic aspect of time. The built environments that move people in any region are the result of accumulated time. The project is a rural library that preserves the adobe fabric of a She-ethnic village, inserting a small bookshop and reading room into the existing courtyard. It is a model of how a cultural institution can be used to regenerate a mountain village, treating the old houses themselves as the most important heritage and adding only minimal new structure.