Shenyang Mixc Renovation

The Shenyang Mixc Renewal is the landscape update of CR Land's flagship luxury mall on Youth Avenue, Shenyang's Golden Corridor, with design by IPD (Australia-EPDE Urban Design), led by Marius Brits and a team including Liu Xiaoqi, Wang Juan, Li Xuesen, Zhang Fusheng, Yang Jiayu, Li Shun and Chen Junlin. As the mall aged, its recognisability faded and its landscape aged, but because architecture and interiors were not being renewed, the landscape had to preserve and innovate on the existing base. The brief is to extend the positive effect of luxury branding from indoor to outdoor space. Borrowing from the way luxury brands repeat signature elements to engrave themselves in memory, the designers search for a single element that, through repetition, overlay and transformation, can produce a distinct commercial temperament; they find it in the square, drawn from the traditional square geometry of the Mukden Palace and tuned to a 'classic, timeless' proposition. Under the master concept of 'fashion waves', three themes chase, gather and tread the waves. The Northeast Plaza fuses commercial 'rapid entry' with urban 'strolling', producing a composite garden that lets people enter the mall from all sides or linger briefly; paving, water, planting and light use the basic square element in layered combinations to simulate rising waves, with bubblers at the entry focusing the eye and strip waters leading inward, before broadening into dancing fountains, bubblers and feature tree pits as the climax. To the south, modules shrink to human scale as a pocket garden, and mirror-polished stainless-steel boxes embed themselves in greenery and water like living sculpture. In the internal commercial lane, a T-shaped space enclosed by buildings on three sides uses squares of varying size and twist to simulate spotlight pools on a catwalk, gathering crowds into the interior. The Northwest Plaza is the city's most important frontage along Youth Avenue, where luxury-brand display must remain complete and grand; three groups of graded square paving surge outward like a tide, while at the commercial boundary the same squares resolve the separation of pedestrians, vehicles and non-motorised traffic, with green patches near the mall entrances carrying rich planting and seating that conveys warmth and urban kindness. Near flagship stores, the paving simplifies to two groups and the gradient softens into an elegant arrival; at the office entrance, the gradient turns perpendicular to the building to underscore business composure. IPD frames the project as one in a long series of urban-renewal works: small design innovations, gathered together, express the firm's determination to help cities become more habitable, kind and beautiful.