Mending Guanlan Old Town

China’s aggressive development has swallowed up tens of thousands of historic sites. This demolition has made Shenzhen - where a city has not only replaced individual towns but a complete spatial history -a city without history.

Working with the remaining heritage buildings of Shenzhen is not purely the restoration of the physical. By ‘mending an old man’ in Chinese medicinal practices have been used as a metaphor for repairing, rebuilding and bringing meaning to the heritage site of Guanlan Old Town. The old street, traditional shophouses and western-style hotel have been redefined by using Chinese cultural references, such as traditional landscape paintings, movies, opera and fiction to bring new meaning to these structures. These interventions create a cinematographic journey through the old town and are mild enough for the old buildings to be rich with expression, it can be summed up as:

Repair is a kind of poetry. This is the story of mending.