Text description provided by the architects
Jinguang Fanghua by Aoyuan and New Hope is located in the Chenghua district of Chengdu, inside the third ring road, roughly 8.5 kilometres from Chengdu South Railway Station and 5.3 kilometres from the North Station, with convenient regional traffic and easy access to the Chengmian interchange. Within a five-kilometre radius the site is ringed by Phoenix Mountain Park, Chengdu Zoo, the Giant Panda Breeding Base, Chengdu Botanical Garden and North Lake Ecological Park, giving it rich surrounding ecology. With a total area of 65,737 square metres, the design is themed as infinite nature: from the original site, the team extracted spatial memories of pond, grove, mound and road and returned them to the new space in a fresh form. Landscape here acts as an extension of nature within each unique place; a thousand-birch grove holds wind, light, water and shadow, and the genius loci of the site, like a law of making, shapes space while continuing cultural memory and keeping nature. In the overall composition, grove, lake, mound and road are abstracted from natural forms into geometric ones, so that site memory and avant-garde art can coexist. Early masterplan studies balanced genius loci with artistic gesture and integrated resources; a journey through nature strings the landscape nodes together, from the undulating street-facing facade to the mound-top viewing platform, from light-and-shadow art in the tree-plaza to the misty stream islands threaded through water and grove, and finally from the rectangular box veiled in water to the aerial walkway among the treetops, all the while showing how light and grove are restored to the site. The spiral installation is the project's technical challenge: after several rounds of development it was divided into four segments, and its rising curve was kept smooth while the visual extension of the landscape and constructability were reconciled.
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