Dahei New Village lies in Xiyang Township, Jinning District, Kunming, Yunnan. Its residents are mostly Yi people. The local traditional dwellings are predominantly earth buildings, some of which had deteriorated into unsafe conditions over the years. In recent years, the “One University One Village” team has carried out a series of earth farmhouse renovation projects in Xiyang Township, developing a new rammed-earth farmhouse construction strategy suited to the region, which has gained wide recognition.
The “public hall” is an important communal building for villagers — used for weddings, funerals, and festive celebrations. Dahei New Village’s original public hall had become dilapidated and unusable. The “One University One Village” team therefore negotiated with the Xiyang Township government to rebuild the hall using new rammed-earth construction technology, providing villagers with a safer, more comfortable public space that fits the local context.
The new public hall was rebuilt on the original site. The building comprises three parts: an outdoor buffer space, a main hall, and a kitchen at the rear. The circulation and layout were rationally optimised based on villagers' usage habits and the original hall’s arrangement.
The walls use locally sourced earth, built with pure rammed-earth construction. To improve seismic performance, the original soil was tested for particle-size distribution in the lab and mixed with an optimised proportion of sand and gravel. No cement, curing agents, or other chemical stabilisers were added. At the end of the building’s life, the wall material can be easily recycled or returned to nature.
Because the local soil had relatively low clay content, the team adopted steel I-beam columns as the primary structural load-bearing elements. Together with the reinforced-concrete foundations, ground ring beam, and top ring beam, the steel-and-concrete structural frame ensures the building’s seismic safety. All these technical innovations were verified through multiple experiments at the KUST Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the “One University One Village” Earth Building Workshop, and tested through the team’s rural construction projects.
The roof truss uses a bamboo-steel composite structure to meet the project’s needs for span, daylight, durability, and aesthetics. Both earth and bamboo have low embodied energy and carbon emissions. Combined with passive design features — natural daylight and ventilation, thermal-mass walls — the building’s life-cycle environmental load is kept to a minimum.
