Restoration risks of traditional vernacular heritage houses in China

Abstract

To rescue the built heritage of traditional houses that are disappearing quickly in rural China because of fast urbanization, one widely adopted strategy is to restore and transform them into a museum. Such restoration work often turns out to be confusing and sometimes disappointing, risking at producing fake heritage in the name of preservation. To explore how this risk is arti?cially generated, this paper takes the Chen house in Chongqing Municipality as an example and analyzes its conservation plan, which has been approved but not yet implemented. The author further discusses the negative impacts of this strategy by combining many cases that have been already restored by this means. Last, the reason for the wide adoption of such stylistic restoration is analyzed and a critical perspective is proposed.