Earthen walled villages in the Shanxi Province: a heritage at risk of disappearing

In the Shanxi province, there are many vernacular settlements enclosed by a square earthen wall that strongly characterize the rural landscape of the Loess Plateau. These farm villages are noteworthy examples of vernacular and earthen architecture but their high earthen walls are often lying in abandonment because they have lost their defensive role and therefore they have not been maintained, with the risk to definitely disappear. The urban tissue of these villages, made of earthen architecture, is the product of traditional building systems that should be recognized as valuable witness of human capacity to adapt to the specific geographical and climatic conditions of the Plateau. An example of great attention to Chinese housing culture is present in the regeneration policies already carried out in Laoniuwan, a village sited between a bend of the Yellow River and a rugged terrain of the Loess Plateau, whose vernacular dwellings are partly dug into soft stone of the loess hillsides - yaodong - and partly completely above the ground. Although in antiquity this and other villages have known prosperity, many of the residents have moved to the big cities, with the consequence of a slow but inexorable deterioration of the buildings. Nonetheless, a rehabilitation project has recently allowed the dwellings reconstruction taking into account the traditional wisdom and the modern materials. This is a good practice that needs to be codified and systematically extended elsewhere in order to avoid material and immaterial risks thus promoting a sustainable conservation. The paper introduces our research aimed at evaluating solutions to ensure continuity of use and significance to these minor architectures of earthen walled villages and also analyzing those villages on comparative base between China and Mediterranean countries. Our belief is that the minor architecture, different in every single region, still gives us the desire to travel and to discover new constructive cultures and new landscapes.