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landscape, urbanity, networks, the suitcase, and the paper-bag:
BAU592 Qingpu Zhaoxiang Sports Park, Supermarket + Hotel

Qingpu District, Shanghai

Discipline

Landscape Archtiecture

Typology

Public park, hotel + retail landscape.

City

Qingpu District, Shanghai

Date

2016-2019

Status

Completed in 2019

Client

People's Government of Zhao Xiang Town, Qingpu District, Shanghai

Program

Circular fitness greenway, sports equipment field, turfed football field, basketball field, tennis field, BMX field, climbing wall, forest yoga field, children's playground, supporting service building and indoor playground

Landscape and urbanity
Public open space is highly contested within the contemporary metropolis. In Australia, parks are frequently dominated by sports programs at the expense of eco-systems, and social/hospitality programs. In China parks are usually dominated by passive picturesque green landscapes, without provision for more active programs. When parks do include multiple programs, these programs are usually isolated, with users of specific programs relegated to restricted areas without a sense of the full scope of experiences the park has to offer.
This project engages with a series of propositions that question this status quo. What if the large-scale buildings proposed for the site were considered landscape? What if each of the park programs (sports, ecology, hospitality) were spread throughout the park so that each could maintain intensity and continuity, but in such a way that they could reach all areas of the site? Could three distinct user groups enjoy the entire park without compromise? Could people (and native fauna) wanting to engage with nature meander the entire site without distraction of sports, cafes, and noisy playgrounds? Could a highly social person stroll continuously along the busiest places, avoiding quiet areas? Could sports fans exercise their way around the whole site, passing each and every energetic opportunity?

Networks
Learning from our own networks approach to urban design, zones for sports, ecology, and hospitality programs have been distributed across the site in three clearly articulated networks. Each network extends to all edges of the site. Each part of each net adapts in width to accommodate its many and varying programs. Each overlaps the other at various locations. And finally, each of the networks are centred on a path or promenade to provide movement through or along the net.

What starts as a networked zoning strategy becomes three distinctly different and continuous formal and spatial landscape experiences: an Ecological landscape, a Hospitality landscape, and a Sports landscape:
• The Eco-net contains a variety of passive programs and facilities, all focused on providing a functioning and continuous ecological environment. It embraces and extends the existing canals and it adds a multi-storied indigenous vegetation to attract insects and native birds. Views out to the surrounding city are limited, the focus being within this network of ambiguous size. A carefully arranged path provides pedestrian access that leaves the opportunity for local fauna to use the net as means of migrating to other larger open spaces.
• The Hospitality-net contains programs that range in scale from the supermarket, to restaurants, tea houses, community clubs, kiosks, bandstands, playgrounds and picnic areas.
• The Sports-net contains among other things a running track with frequent circuit training stations, an indoor sports center with swimming pools, a half football ground, tennis and basketball courts; junior rollerblading track, and a hill of climbing slopes.

At the intersections of these nets, the coexistence of the two intersecting landscapes and programs is explored. One such intersection, where sports and hospitality overlap, results in a hybrid use, a sports clubhouse. Another, where sports and eco overlap, generates yoga platforms immersed in the trees.

The suitcase and the paper-bag
The large scale architecture projects, the hotel and the market, sit within the hospitality landscape, and test and extend two old and quite humorous architectural strategies – the suitcase (a highly ordered, rectangular building refusing to give individual form to the differences in the program) and the string-bag or paper bag (a highly informal arrangement of elements refusing to cease giving individual form to its contents).

The hotel is a highly program-driven architectural brief. The repetition of the hotel rooms and their need for light and ventilation generates a series of long stretched out habitable beams that sit on a podium that contains the reception, and other communal functions and spaces. The sports club program also inhabits this podium. The form is a regular, rigid, and ordered suitcase, but with a large space cut out of it to provide light and fresh air – a filleted suitcase.

Ideally, supermarkets are big, blind, pragmatic boxes with services attached wherever they are needed. Rather than trying to squeeze some formal expression from this large-scale pragmatic box and its attachments, or resort to decorating the box and attachments with advertising, or perhaps breaking down the big-box with what might be considered acceptable human scale elements, BAU wrapped the entire pragmatic lump with a steel mesh screen that disguises the pragmatics with a metaphor, a folded, responsive, slightly expressive, slightly deceptive package – (not a string-bag but) a paper-bag.

Smaller pavilion buildings sit within each of the networks and respond to the forms, spaces, and programs of each of the nets. For example pavilions within the sports-net are rectangular and are oriented north south. Pavilions in the Hospitality-net are circular or have circles removed from their rectilinear forms. While there are no pavilions in the Ecological-net, seating and paving explore organic forms.

Other ideas of order
This park is driven by contemporary understandings of the actions of dynamic systems and the complexity sciences. It is not culture presenting itself as nature (at least not as the singular idea for the park). It is not a picturesque landscape compromised by the pragmatics of program. Nor is it a series of structured outdoor garden-rooms, manipulated to accommodate the sport and service facilities required. By weaving together the co-existence of three integrated but clearly articulated formal and spatial experiences, this park moves beyond the binary oppositions of the dialectic, or the ordering principles of axis, symmetry, or hierarchy. It explores the dialectic as a field of operation, and engages with other ideas of order, the chaotic, the irreducible, and the emergent – contemporary tools to reconcile the conflicting demands on public open space within the contemporary metropolis.