For award-winning MAHA Residential Gardens in Beijing BAM worked closely together with renowned hotelier Adrian Zecha to design the landscape and develop a multiphase masterplan strategy which seamlessly weaves in a complex mixture of new and existing, contemporary and classic to establish a grand sense of time for Beijing premier luxury residence redevelopment project.
The site occupies the northern edge of Chaoyang Park inside the Fourth Ring Road. At the time of engaging BAM, the site architecture was a mixture of four occupied residential towers, five unoccupied towers, a club and multiple classical Chinese and Roman gatehouses in varying states of functionality. The existing landscape was also a smorgasbord of functional and dysfunctional spaces including a scaled replica of an imperial garden and a beautifully maturing manmade forest.
BAM’s design for the landscape and masterplan weave disparate aspects of the site together into a seamless series of gardens, functional spaces, and circulatory pathways. The existing landscape spaces are blended with new landscapes. Conflicting styles, time periods, and cultural references are smoothed out with BAM’s minimalist landscape approach.
Although Beijing’s climate can be extreme it also experiences the fullness and distinct qualities of every season. Gardens for each season are designed to take advantage of the planting’s seasonality bringing unique identities to each space. The Winter Garden is contained within a traditional garden wall punctuated with minimally expressed windows and gates. Planted only with evergreens, the garden will stay green through the often gray and frigid Beijing winter.
BAM carefully picked the best trees from sites with ancient history to plant in the MAHA gardens. The evergreen pines come directly from the base of Taishan in Shandong Province. The existing planting is upgraded to include more all-seasons green. Seasonal highlights feature plant species such as Wysteria vines, Maple trees, Plantain lilies, and red dogwood, adding color and character throughout the year.
Luxury in the landscape is measured in time. A garden cannot be constructed in a day, it must grow. Landscapes must be maintained, cared for, and cultivated. When we look at a masterful or luxurious landscape, we see time itself. We see years of growth, years of maintenance, and seasonal progressions. Unlike architectural fields which depend upon rare or expensive materials to express luxury, the landscape can only trul achieve luxurious expression measured in years or decades. BAM’s idea for the landscape is to establish a grander sense of time, to plant the foundations of a landscape that will grow and continue to mature for generations.
