Tianjin vanke on STC demonstration zone whale's paradise

The Whale Adventure Park at Vanke STC in Tianjin is a roughly 3,600-square-metre play zone designed by Jigao Group within the 45,000-square-metre open Senhai Park developed by Tianjin Vanke. The centrepiece is a giant whale twenty-six metres high and sixty-six metres long, covering about 1,500 square metres, inspired by the 52-hertz whale Alice—who sings at a frequency no other whale answers—crossed with the floating island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The narrative imagines a sky-ocean where whales fly through clouds, and Alice, after singing alone for so long, is finally joined by childlike angels who ride her as she leaps through the sky. Climbing nets, ropes and spiral stairs become the channels by which children fly with the whale; inside the belly of the whale, game panels puzzle visitors through to the exit. The main equipment carries nearly thirty play functions, producing a themed, educational play space that releases children's free nature and recovers childlike wonder in adults. Beyond the whale, a slide through its flank delivers children to a pink dream-beach play zone at a lower level; a circular climbing structure floating at about four metres offers multiple entries, broad interwoven climbing routes and varied challenges that train balance, courage and intelligence. A water-play area, responding to children's innate love of water, uses the rippling rhythm of a calm sea as its basic motif, woven into rolling mounds and fitted with seaweed-light spouts, seahorse rockers, fish zip-lines and a linked water-works factory that invites children to investigate how to draw water from a hilltop and how a spiral scoop works. The whole ocean-themed water zone gives an ordered logic to a site with many functions. Combining function, technology and intelligence, the zone offers nearly thirty kinds of extended play and aims to keep refreshing children's understanding of the ocean, allowing adults and children alike to feel the complexity and greatness of nature in warm parent-child and social settings.