no longer but not only:
BAU213-3 Jindi Yunhu Market

no longer but not only

threshold
Shanghai’s growth strategy is to go west. Within
this growth corridor and at the entrance of a
new residential development (see BAU213-1)
BAU have been asked to provide two buildings
that form a threshold into the housing estate:
one, completed earlier (see BAU213-2) is the
sales house, now a sports and activity centre
with associated retail and services, and a major
contributor to the context for this second project
– a supermarket with associated specialty
shops.

These buildings and their adjacent streets and
sidewalks will be the only place in the larger
housing project where the opportunity to explore
a sense of urban public space and iconography
exists.

the sublime and the no longer inadequate
The sports centre is a major landmark building
and BAU’s second Klein bottle project – a
sublime twisted masonry vessel perforated with
openings for light, ventilation and access.

The super-market typology is generally
dominated by the sensibility of the sub-urban
shopping mall, a big-box surrounded by car
parking. The type generally lacks human scale,
activity around the edge, and any hint of what is
happening in the interior.

More recently, with commercial city centres now
encouraging mixed use, sites can range from,
those hiding behind active commercial streets
to those (as in this instance)n taking pride of
place at the entrance to a community. These
circumstances make it obvious how inadequate
the sub-urban type is when brought into the city.

To rectify the inadequacies of the sub-urban type
this particular big-box building must respond to
two major urban design opportunities: firstly, to
work with the Klein bottle sports centre to create
a place where the residents will want to come
together and engage with each other. Secondly,
to provide architecture that engages with the
larger scale of the city – in this instance the
major highway to north of the project.

resonance
Despite being programmatically and formally
opposites, BAU believed that a series of urban
design strategies would ensure a resonance
between these buildings that would form a
public realm bigger than the sum of the parts.

Consequently, these two buildings are clad
with the same material – a brick tile; the street
between the buildings has been treated as a
shared space (cars and pedestrians) with large
areas of footpath paving and textures taking over
the bitumen road way; the building edges facing
the street are filed with human scaled retail and
service activity; there are awnings to provide
shelter in summer and winter; the northern
edges of both buildings facing the major city
bound highway are treated in the same way –
more a market than a super-market.

This resonance also allows these two buildings
to become a more complex single gesture at
a larger city scale, able to be read from the
speeding cars on the highway.