West-line Studio’s renovation of the Shidada Historic Settlement in Chishui, Guizhou, repairs a dense river-port district by restoring its stone lanes, courtyard houses, timber structures, and communal spaces. Developed over a decade, the project addresses both the old town’s fragile material fabric and the pressures of surrounding contemporary urban growth.
Renovation of Shidada Historic Settlement in Chishui Old Town Technical Information
- ArchitectsWest-line Studio
- LocationChishui, Guizhou Province, China
- Gross Area34,304 m2 | 369,246 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2013 – 2023
- Photographs© Minghua Ou, Chengyong Liu
This reborn model of nostalgia is not only the result of reasoning and the observation of reality; it also reflects the incremental growth of architects practicing in southwestern China.
– Haobo Wei
River Port History and a Fragmented Urban Fabric
Shidada occupies a narrow and strategically charged portion of Chishui Old Town, between the former river wharf to the north and the old city walls on higher ground to the south. The Chishui River once supported the town’s role as a salt-trading port, and the settlement developed in close response to this commercial geography. Its lanes climb the hillside from the waterfront, while tightly packed rooflines register the pressure of building on restricted, uneven terrain. The colloquial name Shidada recalls the sound of boatmen moving over stone paths, linking the physical texture of the streets to the labor history of the river port.
When the survey work began in 2013, this relationship between street, slope, and river remained legible but severely compromised. Stone-paved alleys, fragments of nineteenth-century courtyard compounds, and portions of timber construction had survived. Yet demolition, piecemeal subdivision, unregulated additions, and complex property arrangements had converted many former family residences into overcrowded multi-household dwellings. Deteriorated structures, congested circulation, limited planting, and inadequate public facilities produced an urban condition in which heritage conservation could not be separated from questions of safety and everyday habitation.
The intervention therefore treats Shidada as an urban fabric rather than a collection of isolated protected buildings. Its restored center remains visibly distinct from the taller residential blocks that now press against the historic enclave. Rather than masking this contrast, the project clarifies the low-rise settlement’s scale, roofscape, and pedestrian grain, making its historic relationship to the river and hillside more readable within a substantially altered town.
Repairing the Settlement Through Streets, Courtyards, and Terrain
The masterplan takes the surviving stone lanes as its primary ordering system. Long stepped passages move through the site between closely spaced eaves, linking entrances, small squares, commercial edges, residential compounds, and communal buildings. These routes are not simply retained as visual artifacts. Their repair re-establishes pedestrian continuity across the slope, where topography had always determined access, drainage, frontage, and the sequence of public encounter.
Restored houses and new infill structures follow the terrain through compact footprints, layered grey-tile roofs, and courtyard-based plans. This approach avoids flattening the site into a uniform redevelopment field. From above, hipped and gabled roofs overlap into a dense surface that relates the repaired core to its historic morphology, while whitewashed walls and timber frames organize the elevations at street level. Courtyards puncture this density with light, ventilation, planting, and measured domestic separation.
The project also expands the role of thresholds within the settlement. Shopfronts occupy lane edges, temple yards provide a larger collective room within the urban grain, and garden terraces introduce pockets of planted ground into a formerly congested district. Small gathering areas along the pedestrian network accommodate commercial and residential activity without converting the old town into a static display. The suspended oil-paper umbrellas seen over some alleys add a temporary layer of shade and occupation, although their visual prominence risks shifting attention from the more durable spatial framework of stone, timber, and roof.
Documentation, Salvage, and Vernacular Construction Logic
Material recovery forms a central part of the conservation method. Surviving roof tiles, paving stones, antique bricks, plaques, couplets, wood carvings, lattice elements, and stone column bases were numbered, recorded, dismantled where necessary, and stored for reuse. This procedure acknowledges that the historic fabric had already been altered and dispersed. It also provides a practical means of retaining irregular dimensions, weathered surfaces, and construction evidence that new materials cannot reproduce without resorting to imitation.
The resulting architectural language is based on regional construction logic rather than a single restored image. Timber post-and-beam frames, grey tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, bamboo and plaster infill, and stone paving establish a consistent family of materials across repaired and newly built portions of the district. The distinction between repair and replacement remains consequential. Existing elements retain their age and local specificity, while new work reconstructs structural and environmental performance through contemporary workmanship and selectively simplified details.
The Doctors Residential Compound demonstrates this calibrated approach. A blue-grey brick volume with arched openings is repaired using larger blue bricks, while later red-brick rooftop additions are removed to recover the original roof profile. Roof trusses are corrected, column bases are reinforced, and deteriorated floors and enclosure walls are renewed with timber planks and bamboo-plaster construction. Set around a bamboo-planted courtyard, the compound does not seek to erase evidence of change. Instead, it organizes distinct layers of repair around the courtyard’s legibility and its timber structure.
Heritage as an Evolving Spatial and Cultural Framework
Dapa Temple operates as a communal anchor at the river-facing edge of the settlement. Its arrangement of timber halls, stone-paved courtyard, carved beams, and substantial round columns on stone bases preserves a spatial framework that exceeds domestic scale. A raised stage or platform facing the courtyard indicates the building’s role in collective performance and ritual, while side galleries and lattice screens establish a layered boundary between interior halls and shared exterior space. Conservation here protects not only architectural components but also the conditions for assembly that gave the temple social meaning.
A contemporary pavilion introduces a different register without abandoning the district’s material discipline. Its deep roof overhang, timber-lined soffits, stone balustrades, and dark metal screens draw from familiar elements, but the screen pattern abstracts traditional latticework rather than reproducing it. The intervention is most effective where it remains recognizable as a present-day addition, using proportion, shade, and material weight to relate to adjacent buildings without disguising its different construction logic.
The decade-long process frames conservation as an ongoing negotiation rather than a completed restoration. Shidada must accommodate strengthened structures, improved access, commercial activity, and ongoing residential occupation while retaining the narrow lanes, uneven terrain, and dense collective form that define its historical character. The project offers a useful model of heritage work in rapidly changing regional cities: one in which cultural memory is carried by circulation patterns, material reuse, domestic courtyards, and communal institutions as much as by preserved facades.
About West-line Studio
West-line Studio designed the renovation of the Shidada Historic Settlement in Chishui Old Town. The studio’s work draws on regional construction language, including timber post-and-beam structures, layered grey-tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, bamboo and plaster infill, and stone paving, while engaging the conservation of local vernacular architecture in southwestern China.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Lead Architects: Haobo Wei, Jingsong Xie
- Structural Engineers: Yanping Li, Dingping Fu
- Landscape Designers: Minghua Ou
- Historic Building Restoration: Yudan Luo, Yanping Li
- Site Supervision: Liu Hong
- Site Research: Haobo Wei, Minghua Ou
- Photography: Minghua Ou, Chengyong Liu
