The Bailong Miao Village Folk Complex brings cultural exhibitions, village administration, reading and medical services together in a small public building. As standard construction methods enter the traditional settlement, the project explores “body-based construction”. It draws on both the way the village has grown and the experience of inhabiting it, allowing a new building to continue the stone settlement’s organisational relationships and the particular ways people encounter light, sound, materials and local memory.

The village’s spaces develop through kinship. Houses enclose a family court; several family compounds gather around a larger clearing; these groups, in turn, form a clan settlement around the hill. The repeated relationship of enclosure and grouping at increasing scales creates a nested hierarchy. The complex adopts this generative principle. Rooms for administration, reading and medical care first gather around a square court. This group then joins a curved exhibition hall around an elliptical court to form a larger whole. Rooms, courts and building groups belong to successive levels of organisation, while the complex itself becomes a unit within the larger settlement.

This order of the whole intertwines with individual perception. The Hall of Light, Court of Sound and elliptical court become distinct “perceptual containers”. Coloured light moves through the exhibition spaces with the time of day, recalling the colours of Flower Miao dress. A deep, narrow stone court amplifies rainfall within its stillness. The elliptical court brings the sky between densely gathered stone bodies, evoking local memory associated with the Jiulong legend. Forking routes weave through these spaces, using turns, narrow gaps and changes of level to disturb the stability of their geometry. Choosing a direction, turning sideways and looking up gradually reveal their connections and differences; movement continually brings light, sound and memory into relation.

These spatial relationships are built with frame and masonry construction. Locally made cement-sand bricks are clad in thin bluestone, bringing standard technology and vernacular experience into the same construction. The stone facing addresses damp while shaping atmosphere: its changing tones and textures in sun and rain work with light and sound in the courts. Nested organisation gives the building coherence, while subtle changes unfolding through the body, weather and time sustain the perceptual vitality of vernacular space.