Stitchlink: Gateway | Yunnan, China

Designed on location, and presented to local party officials, this “Gateway” building forms the social, service, and logistics core for the low-impact tourism model we developed for the village of Lijiazhai.

Our proposal focused on cost effective design interventions, using local know how, distributed throughout village; creating a network of renovated lodgings, connected to nearby points of interested by improved roads and pathways, and formalizing social rest spaces that had formed naturally along them.

The Gateway building, located at the nexus of these interventions, and the entrance to the hamlet, supports not only the tourism operation, but the village as a whole. With its open social space and accompanying kitchen, both tourists and villagers can dine together, or just drink tea while waiting for activities and transportation. More critically the gateway provides all the services needed for this distributed tourism model to run successfully in the largely undeveloped village, notably large scale laundry facilities, administration space and storage space, and private employee housing upstairs.

With: Lujac Desautel & Betty Nip Professor: Lisa Findley

Professor: Lisa Findley