Cheese Park

Cheese Park in Ningbo is the adaptive reuse of the Ningbo Daily Press Building, a concrete slab rising above the Sanjiangkou waterfront, the city's most historic core. Originally an office for the newspaper group, the building was leased by Vanke and converted into a mixed-age educational campus anchored by a concert hall - a comprehensive training platform. The name "Cheese Park" plays on the Chinese word for knowledge (zhi shi), signalling Vanke's ambition to leverage knowledge in a city that values learning. Old-conversion projects are like dancing in shackles, and office-to-commercial demands even more agility. The first site visit in February 2017 found the south plaza used as a two-storey car park with the nearest bay less than twenty metres from the concert-hall entrance, while the north-side Ling Bridge was under repair and a temporary auxiliary bridge almost covered the entire north plaza. The design creates a strongly identifiable place through a signature mascot: the Cheese Cat, a large angular sculpture of steel tubes and mesh whose triangular ears and oversized eyes double as a slide exit and a climbing net - a playground in itself. To give the cat intellectual content, the team built gravity-themed play zones: a Gravity Playground between the retained roof slabs and the south water feature, with gravity towers, tension cables, weight rings and vortex paving that make weightlessness, centripetal force, friction and energy transfer tangible; and a Water Gravity Playground that reuses an existing water feature from the former Qiaotou Park, offering water-pressure games, valves, pressure discs and cosmic water rings. The landscape also respects existing civic behaviours around the waterfront rather than severing them from the new programme. Completed in June 2018 on a 35,000-square-metre site with 47,000 square metres of building and 27,000 square metres of landscape, Cheese Park returns a tired city block to vivid public use.