Ma’anqiao Village lies near Panzhihua, Sichuan. After the earthquake, traditional rammed-earth houses collapsed extensively. Collective reconstruction in brick was the conventional strategy, but the introduction of outside building materials and construction machinery often imposed a heavy burden on villagers and drastically altered the village’s appearance.
Dr. Wan Li, a postdoctoral researcher in architecture at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and her team improved traditional earth-building methods, substantially raising the seismic performance of rammed-earth construction, and passed the techniques for building seismic rammed-earth farmhouses on to the villagers.
The Ma’anqiao post-disaster reconstruction project received the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award and the 2016 TERRA Award for earth architecture.
Earth building: 90% of the building materials are local natural materials — stone, earth, timber, straw, and so on.