CASE STUDY
The double eaves found in Yunnan’ s vernacular architecture represent a time-honored ecological response to intense sunlight and abundant rainfall, while also extending the possibilities of semi-outdoor living. The design reinterprets this formal archetype in contemporary terms: layered eaves are introduced at each floor level, integrating shading and drainage into a single tectonic gesture. Here, the double eaves are no longer merely a symbolic reference but a precisely calibrated adaptive system.
Yet the stakes of renovation go beyond physical environmental adaptation. In Lijiang— where tourists and residents, tradition and contemporaneity, the exceptional and the everyday coexist— a hotel must contend with multiple, often overlapping, modes of perception.
The design responds by internalizing these external pressures: a colonnade set back from the street, an introverted courtyard, and a rooftop frame oriented toward the snow-capped mountains— each, within the constraints of a compact site, carves out intervals for lingering and wandering. The traditional local hearth is reinterpreted as a contemporary fireplace, while the colonnade, threading through the public zones, structures both circulation and a sequential scenographic experience. The juxtaposition of color and material sustains a measured tension between the raw and the refined.
These operations neither mimic tradition nor abstract it; rather, they allow form, material, and space to articulate themselves within a contemporary construction context. The renovation does not seek to announce a new beginning, but to establish a place capable of accommodating multiple lives and sustaining layered readings— one that responds to the visitor’ s gaze while making room for the routines of the local; one that borrows the landscape of the snow mountains, yet constructs a world of its own.
• Architects: ALL STUDIO
• Area: 6000 m ²
• Year: 2026
• Photographs: Qingshan Wu www. wuqingshan. cn
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