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The Vernacular Architecture in the Process of Rapid Post-Disaster Reconstruction - A Case Study of Lixian County, Sichuan Province
Authors: Xianmin Mai,·Haiyan Zhong,·Jun Wen,·Kangcai Nie,·Shuang Zhou,·Xiao Luo
Number of views: 467
The rapid post-disaster reconstructions after the Wenchuan earthquake have been highly
praised for its efficiency. However, vernacular residential buildings are somehow ignored in the process
of the rapid reconstruction. In order to study the loss of the traditional architectural context during the
post-disaster reconstruction, the author investigated the residential buildings and carried out some
interviews with the governors, the village head as well as the villagers involved in the post-disaster
reconstruction in Lixian, a county near the Wenchuan epicenter. It is found out that more than half of
the traditional residential buildings were replaced by new houses in the process of the rapid
post-disaster reconstruction. Because of the constraints on the cost, design quality and construction
time, most of the new buildings lost the traditional architecture context. Meanwhile, the consciousness
of the residents to protect the traditional architectural context has risen up for the rapid post-disaster
development of the local transportation and tourism. This study reveals that sufficient attention hasn’t
been paid to the traditional architectural context in post-disaster reconstruction, which has limited the
current tourism development of the county and the rise of the household income. During the
post-disaster reconstruction, attaching importance to the inheritance of traditional architectural
context is of great significance to the sustainable development of the remote mountain areas.