Huizhou Fang
Huizhou Fang is located in the waterfront zone of the Yanghu Lake, Tunxi district of Huangshan city. The design shows an overall city image of estuary of three rivers ((Heng River, lǜ Shui, and Xinan River) through multiple factors such as Tunxi old street in Jiangbei, Liyang alley, surrounding mountains and rivers, and bridges and parks etc.
Currently, the urban development in China has entered a new era with the change of a new developing goal and value orientation. The change is reflected from the number of popularity and extending spatial scales to paying attention to urban culture and shaping spirit, from economic development to attaching importance to people’s livelihood and improvement of living quality, from rough and centralized city management to detailed and scientific decision-making. The urban development keeps coming back to the comfortable, leisure, healthy, safe, and civil etc. that is the most basic pursuit of human beings.
The two themes of the current urban development, also a key character of livable cities, in China consists of realization of the harmony between people and the nature, and inheritance and innovation of regional culture. The livable cities don’t only include beautiful harmonious nature and ecological environment, but also rich connotations of social and cultural environment. Hence, livable cities are not the ultimate goal, but the the eternal pursuit of a city.
The city, Huangshan, possesses the innate condition to build livable cities, natural scene and the most amazing mountain in the world, Mount Huang, and the ancient Huizhou’s cultural accretion. We must grasp of the two core strengths of nature and humanity, and construct urban life with infinite glamour and unique space figure.
Cities in China have experienced rapid development since reform and opening-up, and have made remarkable achievements mingled with regrets. Diverse urban problems and contradictions intertwine here, and opportunities and challenges coexist, which mainly manifests in built-up area of a city, especially cities with historical and cultural traditions. Whereas, it is the issue of common concern from people in all walks of life that how Huangshan
seizes the important historical opportunity of renovation of urban areas, and creates high-qualified urban living environment and unique hill-water landscape, which becomes the pioneer of urban lifestyle in China to attract people from all over the country to work, study, and live, then drive the leapfrogged development of the whole city.
While a city’s whole environment is bettering, a typical case could serve as the activation to become the city’s name card in terms of urban construction. The area of three river located in the center of the city is the most important part of urban renewal assuredly because the area can play its radiating role to surroundings, and achieve the combined effects of the urban renewal with other areas along river banks.
The planning and construction of Huizhou Fang is an innovative practice that relies on the natural environment and cultural traditions to form a cultural result of the future, be faced with globalization among different regions how to deal with the challenge of modernization, and respond to cultural confidence and personality orientation.
The project is situated in the Jiangnan district of the estuary of three rivers. Ancient villages provides historical cultural coordinate and “lateral thinking” as well as creative condition, and makes a perfect combination of experience consumption of cultural industry and promoting traditional culture. In the mean time, responding to the requirement to preserve the heritage of traditional architecture, architects can take advantage of the ancient villages as an indispensable superior resources to build up the urban public spaces as a perfect combination of the traditional and the modern, cultural activities and commercial consumption, and experience and residence. This is the way to carry forward urban culture for Huangshan City, establish a livable model for contemporary cities in China, and participate in the dialogue of urban development with innovative city image and lifestyle in Yangtze River Delta, China, and even from the world.
One belt, one axis, and one ring command the overall arrangement in terms of space planning. The belt of culture and business along riverfront is committed to shape the urban image of the estuary of three rivers; the green ecological axis connects Jiling Mountain and the three rivers; the water ring from origin of brooks around inner islands reflects the tradition of landscape culture in Huizhou. The project emphasizes optimization of open spaces as to create a good link with daily life of citizens. Nodes such as babbling streams, boulevards, roof gardens, layered horizontal and vertical parks, plazas, green area in residential district, small forest, and waterfront connect each other and take shape in different scale, multiple layers, and diverse functions for open-space web systems, which offers an amiable as well as poetic living environment being full of natural factor.
We carry out the design based on agglomeration, streets, aula, and components in architecture, then which are translated into planning, architecture and elevation design conforming to contemporary architectural language. Firstly, the design uses single building in square plan as a basic unit, and then creates the city’s whole image of 800 meters along the south riverbank; secondly, we focus on development of streets to add walking experience to Huizhou; eventually planted aula with different scale into the design with combination of cascading gables produces a rich and variable space experience.
