critical regionalism and abstraction:
BAU487 Nanjing Yaxi Citta-Slow

Yaxi, Gaochun District, Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, China

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Discipline

Architecture, Planning, Landscape Architecture

Typology

Mixed use, hotel, conference centre, urban design, culture, landscape

City

Yaxi, Gaochun District, Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, China

Date

2012-2015

Status

Under construction (Stage 3 of 4 complete)

Client

Nanjing Gaochun Yaxi Citta-Slow Management Committee

Program

Boutique hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, cafés, arts studios, workshops, conference centers, museums, etc.

Critical regionalism and abstraction: Nanjing Yaxi Citta-Slow Village

This new tourism village is the primary accommodation and activity hub of China’s first Citta-Slow. Citta-Slow is a movement founded in Italy in 1999. Citta-Slow’s goals include improving the quality of life by learning from traditional living, working, and learning patterns.

The movement seeks to resist the homogenisation and globalisation of culture around the world, protect the environment, promote cultural diversity, cultivate the uniqueness of places and provide inspiration for healthier lifestyles.

The Citta-Slow district is located in the rural municipality of Gaochun near the city of Nanjing. This new village is the first of a number of sensitive and responsive developments aimed at sustaining the rural population through the development of tourism. This new village seeks to provide the basis for the emergence of a complex living, working community, not simply a commercial theme park with hotels. The majority of its fifty buildings are designed with flexible ground floor use and spaces suitable for living above. Initial programmatic initiatives are organised in clusters and include: children’s programs; art programs; craft programs; produce related programs; and conference programs.

The project aims to maintain the human scale typical of the traditional villages of the area. It does not attempt to mimic the architecture of the villages. The buildings are based on a flexible modular system. In order to create unexpected situations in the project, the module has a wedge plan. The module is flexible and ranges from being very solid to very permeable to suit differing programs. Depending on the orientation, the terraces are positioned for sun access, and are sometimes enclosed with walls to allow for drying clothes out of sight.

Single modules sometimes form independent buildings and other times are connected as two, three, four, or more modules. The roofs of each building are modified depending on the building’s program. Some have numerous terraces for commercial leisure and residential programs, others have pitched roofs for hotel, conference, shopping and entertainment programs. The space between the buildings is also part of the modular system, ensuring adequate public space and creating a human scale. The buildings are organized to create diverse space sequences with plazas and streets of different sizes, allowing different uses. This system is extremely flexible, allowing for easy changes of future uses. What is now a cafe or store tomorrow could be a workshop or an apartment.

The landscape is designed to merge with the architecture, literally covering terraces, walls and the spaces between the buildings. The majority of trees in the project are fruit producing. The urban design allows the continuity of the existing landscape structure, with many of the new circulation paths connecting with the existing tea plantation paths in the adjacent hills.

Private Landscapes

2015

Nanjing

Playgrounds

2020

Suzhou

Public Landscapes

2000-2005

Shanghai

Structures & Pavillions

2019

2023

Office

2005-2010

2021

Shenzhen

Culture

Public

Planning

Hangzhou

Urban Design

Huai’an

Xi'an

Xinyu

Education

2013

Retail

Hospitality

Mixed Use

Sports

Education

2018

Jiangyin

Yixing

2017

Taizhou

Office

Culture

Retail

Melbourne

2016

2011

Residential

Infrastructure

Kyneton

Hotel

Hotel

Wuxi

Healthcare

2014

2012

Healthcare

Fuding

Shaoxing

Chongqing

Kunshan

Wuhan

Cixi

Ningbo

Meishan

Canberra

Jingzhou

Chengdu

Hospitality

1990-2000

Xiamen

Residential

Hopetoun

Caofeidian

an excessive minimalism:
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more Piazza Navona than Levittown
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clarity and unpredictable adjacencies:
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landscape, urbanity, networks, the suitcase, and the paper-bag:
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more than a frozen moment:
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look! up in the sky!
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Made in China, no question – Invented in China, of course:
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a hybrid infrastructure:
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large plains, small grains, and the in-between:
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on reflection:
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Place, typologies, programs, and public life:
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more than just a technopolis:
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a second network embracing history, smalllness, and complexity:
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a park for everyone and everyone in their park:
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disorder – not randonmness but beyond order:
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mosaics of teaching, networks of learning:
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walled cities within a walled city:
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co-existence without incompatibility:
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space-time conflict:
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clarity and unpredictable adjacencies:
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Journeys AND destination, not just destinations:
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continuous loops and internal courts:
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weaving and stitching:
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a constructed and cultured topography:
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it takes a village to educate a child:
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city typologies, cultural traditions, contemporary theories, and spaceships:
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artificial plateau:building more site:
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it is the least we could do: minimalism in an environment of expressionism
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more Piazza Navona than Levittown
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classrooms AND the in-between: teaching and learning beyond the classroom
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other institutions for this new century:
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building the unfinished:
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minimal AND maximal:
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small in scale large in monumentality:
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multiple rooms of difference:
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active cultural edges, passive natural centres:
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intimate, cool, sheltered and lively:
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formal teaching and informal learning:
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an exercise in robustness:
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effortless complexity: learning from water-town:
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no longer but not only:
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actualizing the virtual:
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geometry, history, art, craft, iconography, and pragmatics: an exploration of intention, coding, narrative, and meaning
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there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in:
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BAU009 house in the sky

surreal adjacencies:
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mini-city of culture:
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keeping a low profile:
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positive space, human scale, and a blue-green net:
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dis-integrated guest houses :
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don’t look at me, don’t look at me:
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new buildings, old topography:
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defining the perimeter, programming the centre, inhabiting them both:
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turning outside-in:
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beyond PODS, networks, and nodes:
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podium and bill(ding)board:
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inner sanctuary, outer crust:
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an excessive minimalism:
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a plane of reference:
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rips in the fabric by place:
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other ideas of hospital:
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architecture AND terrain:
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crust: in-between and on the edge
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eco urbanism:
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microcosm:
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beyond the picturesque:
BAU347 Kunshan White Pagoda Park

don’t just re-use the typology, improve it!
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building a community not just housing:
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upside down program – ‘private’ circulation becoming ‘public’ circulation:
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extra-large private space as public space:
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mini-me:
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staggering:
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urban camouflage:
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the resort at the end of the yellow dirt road:
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critical regionalism and abstraction:
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hospital for the ill, health care for the healthy, aged care for the elderly: BAU469 Zhaoxiang Hospital

tear open the package: BAU247 Qingpu NGS Supermarket

urban sponge:
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lyrical islands in pragmatic seas:
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fractured enormity:
BAU281 Chongqing Huarun

ring roads AND peripheral parks:
BAU243 Shanghai Ring Park

simple box OR 3 points in space – you choose:
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many utopias:
BAU129 Xinhu Pearl City Housing Development

a close family:
BAU125 Zhejiang Power Company HQ

stretching, squeezing, bending, trimming:
BAU550 Huanglong Xigu Urban Design

BOTH networks AND objects:
BAU497 Wyndham Cove Eco Sub-urb

ethics, democracy, difference:
BAU470 Towards a Socially Sustainable Canberra

warp and woof:
BAU460 Jingzhou Museum

sustainable technologies for clean living:
BAU396 Nanjing Residential

network of learning:
BAU341 Yushanwan School

not in galleries, but a way of seeing:
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shopping sandwich:
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celebrating the collective, the intimate, the sustainable, and the local:
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21st century Ponte Vecchio:
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antidote: not another ghetto city:
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at last …finally …some diversity:
BAU282 Jindi Sanlin Office

recycling and beyond
BAU264 Shanghai Jiashan Market

an assemblage of difference:
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streets as shelters, bars as amphitheaters, landscapes as playgrounds:
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reduce, reuse, recycle:
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binary oppositions defining a field of operation – all we wanted was a park:
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the hotel as microcosm of the city:
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…very strange:
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the beautiful and the extraordinary:
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a dynamic yet stable vehicle:
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palimpsest:
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innovation both inside and out:
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exquisite corpse
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landscape becomes urban design becomes architecture:
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repetition and difference:
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no longer drowning – waving:
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yet another point of view:
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ordinary not heroic, symbolic not monumental:
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woven threads:
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private precincts, public networks:
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creative networks:
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maximize commuication and cross fertilization:
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