Dali Transformer Factory: Adaptive Reuse by Atelier Alter Architects in Yunnan

The Dali Transformer Factory Theatrical District reworks an abandoned industrial compound at the edge of Dali’s ancient city into a layered cultural landscape. Retaining the factory’s massing and frames, the project builds an undulating roof promenade tied to views of Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake while distributing performance across interior galleries, clerestories, and terraces. Through strategic cuts, insertions, and media-driven programs, the ensemble registers industrial memory, Baizu residential logics, and contemporary scenography as a single navigable topography.

Dali Transformer Factory Theatrical District Technical Information

• Architects: Atelier Alter Architects
• Location: No. 3 Pingdeng Rd, Dali, Yunnan, China
• Gross Area: 9,751 m² | 104,959 Sq. Ft.
• Completion Year: 2023
• Photographs: © Xia Zhi, © Highlite Images, © Jin Weiqi

We treated the factory not as a single object but as a walkable section of the city, where dispersed theaters infiltrate everyday routes and industrial remnants host shifting vantage points.

– Yingfan Zhang

Roofscape as Urban Topography and Contextual Interface

The former transformer workshop set the district’s volumetric datum, rising above the surrounding historic fabric with direct sightlines to Cangshan and Erhai. Rather than smoothing the varied roof levels, the design amplifies them into a connected public promenade of paths, bridges, and terrace landings. The recalibrated roofline becomes an urban plateau that absorbs circulation and assembles outlooks, turning maintenance catwalks into civic infrastructure while respecting the factory’s sectional profile at the edge of the old city.

Existing structural frames and clerestories are kept legible, then layered with new connective devices that stitch high and low roofs into an undulating sequence. The resultant topography mediates between the orthogonal grain of the industrial sheds and the long geologic horizons beyond, positioning the architecture as an interface rather than a landmark. Industrial remnants read alongside vernacular cues and contemporary insertions, so the complex operates as a palimpsest where each layer retains agency. The roofs do not cap a set of discrete buildings; they perform as a shared ground where historical, scenic, and programmatic fields meet.

By externalizing circulation and extending it upward, the project relocates the experience of approach and intermission to the skyline. The roofscape softens the compound’s perimeter without erasing its heft, and its varied platforms open the ensemble to the city while preserving the legible mass of the original factory volumes.

Distributed Theaters and Choreographed Movement

The project treats theater as a dispersed condition rather than a singular room. Micro venues are embedded within clerestories, tucked beneath roofs, projected as window boxes, and arranged as rooftop or linear galleries along the second level. These micro heterotopias sit parallel to day-to-day uses, creating pockets of focused attention within circulation routes, reading rooms, and dining spaces. The architecture leverages adjacency so that routine movement can tip into staged encounters without hard thresholds.

Interior suspended walkways and exterior zigzag ramps link the venues into a curated section of city life. Vantage points are choreographed to shift between oversight and immersion: bridges cut across voids, mezzanines hover within double-height bays, and terraces cantilever to frame long views before re-entering the sheds. This sequencing cultivates role changes between spectator and participant as visitors navigate from ground-level halls to rooftop landings and back through clerestory corridors.

Historic industrial rails are reactivated to mobilize theater boxes that slide from facades into exterior plazas or dock with the main transformer hall. This mechanical reuse extends staging beyond fixed rooms, enabling variable audience arrangements and site-responsive scenography. The capacity to merge, split, and reposition these units transforms the compound into a performance field where architecture, machinery, and crowd act in concert.

Typological Reinterpretations and Material-Structural Strategies

The guard’s house is reworked through sectional cuts that expose the Baizu courtyard archetypes. Glass planes infill removed segments to complete volumes with a calibrated transparency, keeping the legible rhythm of rooms and courts while clarifying circulation spines. This approach supports program shifts from residence to micro museum and onward to media-oriented dining without erasing typological cues. The new partitioning foregrounds thresholds and layered courtyards as spatial instruments rather than décor.

In the iron workshop, the rough stone-bearing walls and steel frames remain in place, while partial curtain walls and aligned glazing reinstate the logic of the original openings. The contrast between retained heavy walls and lightweight insertions foregrounds the building’s structural hierarchy and its industrial memory. Street fronts read as sectional displays of construction, where old lintels, new mullions, and patched masonry narrate the evolution from production floor to crafts showroom.

Former storage is converted into a bookstore by retaining the primary frame, replacing stucco with brick facings to restore material grain, and applying reflective finishes to dematerialize the structure visually. The film archive adopts a house-within-house strategy to achieve darkness without compromising the supporting skeleton. A thin envelope lines perimeter bays, turning first-floor walls into operable theatrical boxes and the second-floor corridor into a linear theater, while the roof accommodates open-air performance. These tactics separate environmental control from the existing frame, allowing careful preservation alongside program-specific atmospheres.

Programmatic Ecology and Temporal Atmospheres

The main interior consolidates four hybrid zones that operate at the boundary of performance and hospitality: Mirroring Bar, Heart-beat Factory, Mood Hospital, and Awakening Space. Each zone can work autonomously or in combination, enabling the compound to flex between intimate gatherings and large events. Suspended galleries cross these spaces at intervals, providing high-level overlooks that function as control decks, promenades, and quiet perches for observing rehearsals and shows.

Diurnal shifts are scripted into the architecture. Daytime gardens, markets, and reading rooms rely on the clarity of the existing sheds and the calibrated porosity of new glazing; at night, media systems recast these volumes with projection, sound, and light. The Heart-beat Factory’s open market becomes an electronic hall, while the Mirroring Bar doubles as a self-observational stage through reflective surfaces and controlled luminance. The bookstore’s restrained materiality reads as a calm interior by day, then slips into a low-reflectance glow that emphasizes silhouettes and browsing rituals after dark.

Inclined spatial divisions and cantilevered paths coordinate perception and movement, turning structural grids into dynamic fields rather than static orders. In the assemblage building, irregular voids are preserved to support experimental staging that benefits from unfinished edges and visible joints. The project navigates tension between spectacle and material authenticity by allowing media layers to be reversible and by keeping primary envelopes and frames expressive of their load paths. The result is not a singular theater but an ecology of rooms, surfaces, and routes where industrial matter and contemporary performance continually recalibrate one another.

About Atelier Alter Architects

Atelier Alter Architects is a Beijing-based architecture studio founded in 2009. The practice is known for its transformative approach to adaptive reuse and its commitment to spatial experimentation, structural clarity, and programmatic hybridity. With a focus on integrating architecture into urban and cultural landscapes, the firm often reinterprets typologies and materials to create immersive environments that engage both context and community.

Credits and Additional Notes

1. Client: Dali Old City Overseas Chinese Town Investment Development Co., Ltd
2. Construction company: China Railway 18th Bureau Group Co., LTD.
3. Structural engineers: Wenfeng Li, Xingwang Li, Jun Liu (Beijing Institute of Architectural Design Co., Ltd)
4. MEP consultants: Feng Qi, Lei Pei, Cheng Zhang, Yuting Li, Lin Jie (Beijing Institute of Architectural Design Co., Ltd); Xinzhi Chen, Yuyan Xie (Guangzhou Bosha Institute of Architectural Design Co., Ltd.)
5. Landscape designers: YZscape
6. Lead Landscape Architect: Fanyu Meng; Team: Miaomiao Guan, Teng Wang, Zhenyu Wang, Zihan Zhao, Yue Hao, Ying Zhou
7. Lighting: GD Lighting Design
8. Sound: Jinjing Chen, Shuyun Wu
9. Curtain Wall Consultant: Chongqing Yinqiao Engineering Design (Group) Co., Ltd
10. Signage Consultant: MOUJITI ART+TECH; Degradation Design Laboratory
11. Stage Design: Atelier Alter Architects PLLC; MOUJITI ART+TECH; Tao Xiangju Film and Television Studio in Ningbo Xiangbao Cooperation Zone
12. Research references or publications: Photo and video documentation by Xia Zhi, Highlite Images, Jin Weiqi; Video: Xia Zhi Pictures