The Wu Zh Qiao Practice - Local Materials Applied in Rural Areas in the West China

Abstract

The New Countryside Construction has been launched in China several years. In one hand, the amount of building construction in rural area in China is increasing rapidly. In some areas, vernacular buildings were abandoned because of their relatively poor performance of durability, seismic behavior, construction speed, and so on. But simply copying the conventional urban construction model is not a sustainable solution for diversified situations in rural area. On the other hand, in lots of the remote rural areas, the public facilities of villages are not convenient and perfect enough, because the transportation costs is much higher than construction costs. To solve these problems, the Wu Zhi Qiao (Bridge to China) Charitable Foundation organized a series of studies and construction practice in rural area of west China. Among them, gabion bridge and anti-seismic rammed earth house are two of the representative high-science and low-tech solutions for rural China. This paper will present how the local materials applied in rural areas in gabion bridge and anti-seismic rammed earth house projects, and discuss the performance and sustainability of these high-science and low-tech solutions.