Xi’an Forest Park

ONGOING, XI'AN, CHINA, 2017

We win another competition!  Although this was advertised as a design for a park, it turned out to be for an intensely hybridized combination of public green and recreational space, a shopping mall, and a lot of parking.  We present the scheme in a fairly preliminary form as we’re only in the early stages of schematics and the client keeps adding and modifying the program.  Neverthess, our strategy should be relatively clear.  First, the uppermost plane is always public.  Second, the scheme means to blur the lines between architecture, topography, and landscape.  And finally, there is an ongoing effort at reciprocal insemination of green and built elements in section, pulling light downwards.  Although we’re well aware that our biped selves favor flat – or mildly inclined – planes to accomplish most of our daily tasks, we’ve tried to create an object that is not simply a lamination of floors but something more flowing and programmatically spliced, something at once accessible and a little hard to pin down.  Let’s see where it goes!

Credits: Q. Chen, J. Gu, P. Ibero, Y. Liu, M. Okazaki, Z. Quan, J. Sevene, M. Sorkin, A. Waxman, M. Villalobos, L. Yin, N. Ni, BIAD