Heritage “Ay” Kiln Adaptive Renewal

Architects: WUGE Studio, YFS
Area: 778 m²
Year: 2025
Photography: Qingshan Wu
Lead Architects: Wang Lulu, Zhang Mingming, Zhang Yifan
Architects Team: Yan Juan, Xu Junwei, Gu Songming
Structural Engineering: iStructure
Structural Consultant: Yang Xiaotian
Materials: Rammed earth, timber, stone, grey brick, glass, concrete
City: Ningde
Country: China

Heritage “Ay” Kiln Adaptive Renewal by YFS and WUGE Studio reworks a century-old ceramic production compound in Ningde, China, into a renewed site for craft, exhibition, and public experience. The project centers on a traditional hillside dragon kiln used for Ay ceramics, a black-glazed ceramic tradition indigenous to northeastern Fujian. Over time, the compound had grown through informal additions, including a rammed-earth house, a brick-and-concrete dwelling, stone outbuildings, and work areas arranged around the kiln. The renewal clarifies this accumulated condition by introducing an 8-meter-tall grey-brick boundary wall, reorganized circulation, and three distinct courtyards for reception, production, and hillside observation. Existing rammed-earth, timber, stone, and kiln structures are retained and combined with new glass, brick, timber, and concrete systems. By aligning visitor movement with the ceramic-making sequence, the project presents production as an active cultural process while preserving the site’s material memory and rural character.

Heritage “ay” kiln adaptive renewal / yfs + wuge studio

Heritage “Ay” Kiln Adaptive Renewal treats the kiln compound not as an isolated monument, but as a living record of rural production shaped by repair, necessity, and accumulated use. Its architectural value emerges from the coexistence of elements from different periods, where traces of labor, dwelling, storage, and craft have formed a complex spatial field. YFS and WUGE Studio respond by clarifying rather than erasing this inherited disorder, establishing a framework in which the site’s irregular growth becomes legible as part of its cultural identity. Positioned at the entrance of a village and bordered by open fields, the site occupies a threshold between everyday rural life and specialized ceramic production. The elongated dragon kiln follows the hillside, anchoring the compound both physically and historically. Around it, older rammed-earth construction, stone structures, and later brick-and-concrete additions reveal a century of self-organized adaptation. Before the renewal, these layers preserved the vitality of local craftsmanship, but they also blurred the boundaries between working, living, displaying, and making.

Heritage “ay” kiln adaptive renewal / yfs + wuge studio

The project’s primary architectural intervention is a two-story boundary wall placed along the edge of the plot facing the adjacent road. This wall introduces a buffer where the site previously lacked one, giving the compound a clear public edge while organizing its scattered buildings into a coherent whole. Rather than functioning only as an enclosure, the wall becomes a device for perception. Its geometry gathers the historic elements into a more readable composition, allowing the existing kiln and surrounding structures to be seen as artifacts within a carefully ordered field. The design draws on the dialectic of transparency and obstruction, using the wall to reveal the site through controlled moments of concealment and exposure. Apertures are positioned to frame selected views, transforming fragments of production, material texture, and movement into focused spatial experiences. Transparency is therefore not achieved by removing boundaries, but by constructing a more precise relationship between viewer, craft, and context. The wall clarifies what had been visually overloaded by creating distance, sequence, and attention.

Inside the compound, the traditional ceramic-making process is reorganized into a clear spatial progression: raw material preparation, forming, glazing, firing, display, experience, and retail. This arrangement allows visitors to follow the logic of production without interrupting the work of craftsmen. The project frames making as an active form of cultural transmission, where observation is integrated into the daily rhythm of the site rather than staged as a detached exhibition. Three courtyards structure the renewed plan. The front courtyard supports reception and display, establishing an initial point of orientation. The central courtyard remains tied to daily production, preserving the functional heart of the compound. The rear courtyard connects to the hillside, where platforms and stairways create elevated viewpoints across the kiln, terrain, and surrounding village landscape. Through this sequence, the project transforms a working craft site into an architectural promenade shaped by labor, material, and topography.

Heritage “ay” kiln adaptive renewal / yfs + wuge studio

Material interventions are calibrated to preserve temporal layers while supporting new programs. Reusable rammed-earth and stone walls are retained, while stone elements once adjacent to the kiln are reinforced to maintain their grounded presence. In deteriorated rammed-earth areas, timber shelving and glass display walls introduce contemporary uses without imitating the original fabric. Interior spaces adopt a double-layer timber framework executed by local carpenters, extending the project’s connection to regional construction knowledge. The new rear platforms use beamless concrete slab systems with 10-centimeter wood-grain textures. This treatment gives the concrete a tactile quality that mediates between solid rock and porous earth, linking the hillside terrain with the renewed architecture. The material does not attempt to disguise its contemporary role; instead, it becomes another visible layer in the compound’s ongoing transformation.

Heritage “ay” kiln adaptive renewal / yfs + wuge studio © Qingshan Wu © Qingshan Wu © Qingshan Wu © Qingshan Wu © Qingshan Wu © Qingshan Wu © Qingshan Wu

The 8-meter-tall grey-brick wall is also the project’s most symbolic construction. Aligned with the gable of the dragon kiln, it operates as spatial geometry, a structural system, and a cultural reference. A steel frame and rebar lattice support the porous brickwork, whose modular pattern shifts from dense to open. This gradient recalls the airflow essential to kiln firing while producing a measured tension between mass and lightness. The choice of grey brick strengthens the project’s relationship to ceramic heritage. Like Ay ceramics, the wall is formed from earth and transformed through fire, making it both an architectural boundary and a material echo of the craft it protects. As an obstacle and a window, it reconciles disorder without erasing complexity, linking the inherited landscape of production with a contemporary architectural language grounded in memory, labor, and place.

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