Text description provided by the architects
The project sits in the Life Science City on the Fangqiao plot in Fenghua District, Ningbo, within thirty kilometers of the coastline. Life Science City is an investment hot spot, the half-hour living circle on Ningbo's southern axis and a model new town for industry-city integration. Although infrastructure is still new, forward-looking planning, the golden intersection of three districts and emerging industry make it the next residential destination for young Ningbo residents. The brief is to build a future-tech interactive place, a young artistic space and a demonstration of future good life. The site has three fixed characteristics: a clear front-sales-rear-show structure, an urban street-corner front that will be temporary while the surrounding district is under construction, and tight spatial dimensions. The design must deliver a distinctive urban interface, extend limited space infinitely, and depict future living in the permanent rear garden. The story begins with the geology of Fenghua, where mountains and sea have met for millennia, passing from tropical immersion through swampland to the present plain. The design reproduces a single moment: the 0.1 second when sea water strikes mountain rock. What is visible in that unrecorded instant? The fractured texture of stone, the splintered fragments breaking time's darkness, the cavities that reflect another world's water color, the future playgrounds of children running between sea and stone. Frozen at that moment, the impact fragments are recomposed into a continuous skin for the site, resolving hoardings, entrances, corridors and the central court in one gesture. Iridescent acrylic becomes the medium that captures light, turning shadow into art. Five spaces and four scenes organize the journey: interface, entrance, middle, rear and water court, with the Overlap installation, Sea-Stone Gate, Sunlight Illusion and Water-Light Corridor. The interface freezes the sea-rock impact, while the Overlap installation peeks through to the inner courtyard. The entrance continues the fractal texture, folding forward through a white opening. The middle is a contemplative space of water-shadow illusion. The rear water-light corridor draws visitors toward the inner court, where a cascading waterfall behind iridescent acrylic is half-hidden among dawn-redwood trees. The 4,000-square-meter project, designed May-July 2021 and completed that August, is developed by China Merchants Shekou and Huahong Jiaxin.
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