The prototype in Songzhuang, an isolated historic mountain village in Zhejiang province of eastern China, was finished in July 2026 and is the culmination of the 20-month collaborative design research project ‘Climate Heritage on the Edge’. The project was led by Dr Xiang Ren from the School of Architecture and Landscape, in collaboration with Co-Investigator Prof Linxue Li from Tongji University in China.
The local buildings in Songzhuang were originally built without the input of trained architects, instead drawing from the tacit, vernacular wisdom of local people, including about how to deal with the extremes of the hot summers and cold winters that the region experiences.
The prototype is an evidence-based design utilising adaptive reuse of an existing building, and climate modelling to inform methods of strengthening its natural materials such as timber and clay, building on knowledge gained from vernacular architecture and the natural world.
The prototype will serve as a long-term ‘living lab’ to test the scalability of its building methods, with the goal of supporting other buildings and villages in the region, many of which are currently abandoned due to their unsuitability for modern quality of life. The team is in the process of influencing local and regional policymakers to encourage the uptake of the prototype’s concepts.
Dr Xiang Ren, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Landscape said: “It has been a real pleasure to work on this project with the high profile team at Tongji University. This project continues our School’s long tradition in East-West studies and evidence-based design for solving problems from the real-world, and demonstrates our shared ambition with key international partners.”
In March 2025, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield, Prof Koen Lamberts, visited Tongji to discuss collaborations between the two universities with this project included in the briefing.
The project was funded by the University’s Global Engagement Partnership Development Fund as part of the UoS-Tongji Framework. The Sheffield team includes Dr Huriye Armagan Stewart (stage 1 PDRA), Dr Yuzhou Du (stage 2 PDRA), Dr Yiwen Yan (stage 2 PDRA), Dr Pengcheng Zhou (stage 3 PDRA) and Kam Fai Tai (stage 1 contributor).
This project ran alongside the separate Decoding Dong project, also led by Xiang Ren and University of Sheffield, which used 3D scanning technology to document large, at-risk heritage buildings of the Indigenous Dong group in their remote villages in the south-western mountains of China.