Dali Transformer Hub | Space for Art and Life大理变压聚场｜生活艺术聚落

On the edge of Dali's ancient city, between Erhai Lake and the Cangshan Mountains, a disused transformer factory has been reawakened as a new Transformer Art Field. Alongside the main Dali Transformer Park Theater, 1970s industrial relics — warehouses, a chicken coop, a blacksmith's workshop and gatehouses — have become a bookstore, an immersive dining venue, an independent cinema and traditional art workshops, linked by winding walkways, undulating roof ramps and a central plaza. The guiding idea is to infuse theatricality into everyday life: with minimal intervention, the project keeps the industrial texture and the Bai cultural imprint, so that the theater becomes a living scene that permeates the whole block.

Each building follows its own strategy. Heaven Bookstore keeps the frame and equipment of a single-storey factory, strengthening its slab with bonded steel and reshaping the façade with larger window frames. The dining venue, carved from a gatehouse and a small warehouse, uses checkerboard-like incisions that set retained masonry against new glass; on the road to the main theater, reflective surfaces set into the ground create a shifting water feature. The art workshop on the Pingdeng Road market street keeps its large Bai-style roof and opens its street front with glass and native planting. At the back, a concrete wall poured behind the rubble stone adds seismic strength, while large high-reflective windows turn the landscape inside out and their sills become seats.

Grey tiles, grey and red brick, steel, marble and rubble stone — local, unpolished, with reinforcement concealed — root the block in its place. The roof ramps double as viewing platforms toward Cangshan and Erhai, and visitors become both audience and performers of a daily drama.