With the rapid development of Chinese cities, the spatial pattern in historical districts has deteriorated due to a lack of protection measures. Indigenous communities have taken it upon themselves to expand certain spaces around the original residential buildings in order to meet the demands of modern life. However, this expansion has had a negative impact on the stylistic integrity of historical districts, leading to a conflict between cultural heritage and district protection. This study focuses on Tanhualin, a representative historical district in Wuhan. The study divides the district into 10 sub-areas, extracting a total of 4850 street views and selecting 6752 spontaneous spatial samples from them. Utilizing the Mask R-CNN model, the study uses computer-based deep learning to identify, summarize, and categorize the various forms and functions of these spontaneous spaces. The study also analyzes the negative impact of these spaces on the unity of the historical blocks’ interfaces, as well as their positive impact on cultural heritage and the creation of a distinctive atmosphere. Finally, the study proposes reconstruction and renewal strategies from both urban design and architectural design perspectives. These strategies aim to improve the quality of life for indigenous communities, establish a sustainable system for preserving historical imprints, protect the cultural atmosphere of historical blocks, and enhance the adaptability of these blocks in modern cities.

Ginling College is the first women’s college founded by the American Christian Church in Nanjing, China, in the early 20th century. The architectural style of the school reflects the orientation of the “Chinese localization” of the Christian Church at that time. It is a representative work of the revival of traditional Chinese architecture. It is known as a “Renaissance of Chinese traditional architecture” and profoundly influenced later generations. Due to its important historical status and artistic value, the Ginling College complex has been designated by the Chinese government as a national key cultural relic protection unit and China’s 20th-century architectural heritage, and the protection scope of the Ginling College historical district has been specially designated for overall protection. Currently, little research has been conducted on this historic area, so the authors undertook this project. This paper adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods for research, starting from the two aspects of architectural art and sustainable design, and analyzes in detail the artistic characteristics of the project, the structural materials obtained locally, and the sustainable design method that utilizes natural lighting and ventilation to explore a modern campus design method based on the concept of sustainable design with a “combination of Chinese and Western architectural art”. Through artistic creation and technological innovation, traditional Chinese revival architecture has realized a harmonious coexistence between man and nature, embodying the design concept of sustainable development, and promoting the development of architecture and the region.

In the face of the increasingly deteriorating global environment, the sustainability of building systems has become a major research topic. This paper presents sustainability research on large-scale building cases from the perspectives of ecological emergy value and carbon emissions. Specifically, by calculating the emergy value and carbon emissions throughout the entire life cycle of the building system, a quantitative analysis of sustainability based on the LCA–emergy–carbon-emissions framework is completed. The results indicate that from the perspectives of both emergy value (over 80%) and carbon emissions (over 90%), the operational stage and the building-material-production stage are the controlling factors. Retrofit design strategies help enhance the sustainability performance of the building system, but different types of design strategies have different effects. The landscape-transformation-design strategy (strategy A) significantly improves the ecological sustainability of the building system, the equipment-improvement strategy (strategy B) helps reduce the carbon emissions of the building system, while the infrastructure-renewal strategy not only has a weaker impact on sustainability improvement but also generates the highest carbon emissions. Additionally, with the aim of controlling carbon emissions, the integration of solar clean energy sources contributes to the overall sustainability of the building system, providing references for architects and building managers.