Buji Residence

Shenzhen is a place of utter newness, a city born in the 1990s. It is the cradle of tech innovation in China and regards itself and its urbanism as entirely future-focused. BAM’s project site is set within a mountainous region of Shenzhen, resulting in dynamic height differences. The landscape of the project consists of two entirely different types of landscapes, an undulating streetscape that traverses drastic sectional conditions which encircles the flat central landscape from which the residential towers emerge. At the lower level of the site, the streetscape provides access to retail and a small bus terminal tucked below the overhead landscape podium containing recreational gardens for the residences towering above. The podium level landscape is unceremoniously cut in two by the required emergency vehicle circulation. BAM adapts this element into a zigzagging pathway which serves to tie the two sides together by camouflaging the vehicular road through aggressive and insistent patterning. This zigzagging path at once, is the primary factor which divides the site, while also bringing it together, meanwhile acting as the main circulation leading residents to their open-air tower lobbies. The playground at the center of the development is a constructed testament to the experimental nature of not only Shenzhen as a city, but its inhabitants. The mere existence of such an explosive gesture of planting, patterning, color, and materials which has become so quickly absorbed into the culture as common place, typical, or even generic, is a true testament to Shenzhen’s progressive nature and rapid future-oriented development. Project: Buji Residence Design firm: BAM Location: Shenzhen, China Site Area: 18,691 m2 Construction: 2019