Why I built an AI Map for Ancient Architecture

I’m always fond of exploring places where time got encapsulated, where you wander into a rural village nobody recommends and find a preserved temple hall standing quietly behind a primary school.Traditional Chinese architecture has held me since childhood. Living in a city dominated by Soviet-style architecture and unregulated brick-and-cement housing, the surviving architecture from the previous generation holds some magical tension against the monochrome city fabric. There were stories behind the preservation of that building, the regret of how some got demolished without a trace, the narrative sealed inside the physical site that can only be told through the remaining steles.(Left) Zhihua Temple, Dongcheng, Beijing, embedded in the ancient city fabric right next to Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO | (Right) Thousand-Buddha niche (千佛龛) in the temple main hallWhen China named its first batch of national key cultural heritage sites in 1961, preservation was the least priority for the whole…