Participatory Landscape Combining Culture and Nature
Vanke Hometown is located in Paitan Zengcheng, a new landscape city in eastern Guangzhou. It enjoys the exclusive 4A-level scenic spot Baishui Village, surrounded by mountains, streams, rice fields and hot springs. The low-density landscape garden community, sharing art farms, hot spring clubs and pastorals form a unique style of “urban garden health care” that suggests the detachment from everyday life, and creates a natural harmony of contemporary living ideals.
Reshape the Urban Interface and Enhance the Living Environment
GND is responsible for the landscape design, aiming to develop an active gathering space. We hope to build a shared landscape space that makes people easy to reach from any place and establish a close relationship with people's daily life.
The display area is located behind the community park and is independent. How to integrate the base with the community park to realize the exchange and interaction between the city, the landscape and the people is the difficulty and highlight of the design.
In the design, we repeatedly deduced and simulate the living scenes in this place. In addition to the functional satisfaction, how to create specific behaviors and emotions for each space by our design? Through the construction of these living scenes, we gradually build those interesting things in daily life.
The design takes advantages of the community park landscape resource, and creates a participatory space that integrates with the urban interface with the concept of “border integration and interactive sharing”, forming an active neighborhood atmosphere and bringing the ideal city to a new level.
Create a Unique Character for the Landscape Space
To establish a spatial sequence for “returning home”, a series of experiences from community parks, commercial pedestrian streets, neighborhood spaces, and community entrances are connected tier upon tier with an outside-in approach to produce expectations and beauty of returning home.
The creative integrated design of the community park and the exhibition area has collected the ceremonial space, functional space and experience space. The unique spatial sequence sense also gives more emotions to the landscape, making it more artistic and participatory.
The ceremonial space uses the blocking view design method, so the everlasting sceneries vary with changing view-points where there are dry landscape lights, peaceful water springs, stones and ancient trees. To interpret the classical rhyme with modern elements, the texture is transparent. The small space of landscaping and the large space of nature are communicated, so that people can get the wonderful feelings of a big world from a small dimension.
Stepping into the square, the interactive waterscape is naturally connected to the front view. People can walk through the water screen or play in the water where the harmony between man and nature gets the most vivid display. On the left, there are mainly the parking area and the leisure green park, providing parking and rest for the commercial street in the future.
Participatory Fun Activity Space
The play area for children of all ages makes full use of the high and low changes of the original landform to create the undulating slope which makes the space more layered and maximizes the activity space. With the hills, slides and trampolines to arouse the children's interest and encourage them to explore the environment in order to cultivate their various outdoor abilities.
The design chooses high-branched deciduous plants with stretched canopies to provide activity sites with green shades in summer and warm sunshine in winter, also allowing children to understand natural changes through plant growth changes.
At the same time, the design is based on the safety first. The feature wall ingeniously separates the children's area from the traffic lane outside. The curved design of seats in the parent waiting area avoids collisions between children in the activities. Vibrant colors produce a lively and bright atmosphere. Through multi-dimensional considerations, the design creates an activity space with humanistic care and gives children a world where they can play freely.
Commercial Street with Both Prosperity and Nature
The commercial pedestrian street respects the natural beauty as the core and uses nature as the source and theme of the landscaping. Adhering to the supreme concept of harmony between man and nature, the combination of stone, water and planting in the entire block conforms to the symbiotic principle of "the union of heaven and human" in Chinese cultural tradition.
An old tree and a slate are constantly emitting vitality, giving people a mixed feeling of energy and quietness. A shared environment communication space is naturally formed, which maximizes the value of the garden commercial street and also creates a commercial atmosphere properly.
Ingenious Design Demonstrates Natural Elegance
The residential entrance gate is designed to blend the architectural elements. Fresh and clean wood color, smooth and beautiful lines construct the landscape wall of framed view, where the stairs are hidden behind to avoid take in everything at a glance and create a traditional spirit of "hidden but not exposed". The artistic dry landscape with the theme of a natural mood embraces the aesthetics of contemporary temperament with its wood and stone to make the space even more vivid.
Walking into the courtyard, the swimming pool design utilizes the height difference to create a scenic view. Enclosed by hedgerows, the pool water is contrasted with lush plants and hard pavement to demonstrate a visual tension and a spatial atmosphere with delicate layers and texture.
The landscape design has closely followed the overall function zoning plan, and the design concept with nature and ecology as its core has inherited the essence of Chinese culture to break up the whole into parts which are scattered and connected. When walking in the landscape, sometimes it is open and clear, sometime there are winding paths leading to secluded places, together the design has created contemporary life scenes with rich layers returning to nature.
