Vanke Shuangliu Green Building Industrial Park

Vanke Shuangliu Green Building Industrial Park is a mixed industrial campus combining exhibition, R&D, offices and production, with landscape by UP+S Arbos Design. The showcase landscape centres on a flagship rain garden that will serve as the core of the future campus; the R&D and employee areas around it are treated as a series of habitats - gentle forest, shallow grass, micro-rills, empty hills, quiet fields and hidden valleys - providing varied wildlife habitat and rich biophilic space for staff. Quoting Ian McHarg, the design holds that a good city balances two systems, the natural and the artificial, and that natural systems must be allowed to evolve on their own terms. Rather than leaning on Sichuan's familiar historical themes, the project focuses on ecology, using modern engineering to create a wild, primitive-feeling ecological space that reconciles nature and artifice. The team studied Sichuan's dramatic topographic transition from the Tibetan Plateau to the Yangtze basin, and on that basis shaped the core rain garden as cascading terraces that step down from the green roof of the mountain-shaped exhibition building: the building's roof suggests the high plateau, the terraced rain garden the descending hills, the connecting plaza the human plains, and the sunken lawns the Sichuan basin itself. A portfolio of LID facilities - rain gardens, permeable paving, green roofs and dry creeks - treats stormwater on site and makes the campus a resilient, low-maintenance sponge-landscape exemplar. Materials are modularised to match the precast concrete products of the PC factory, and assembled landscape construction is used in places; paving, planting, furniture and structures all follow the exhibition building's modular grid. A central lake captures runoff from buildings and ground, framed by mounded woodland that screens the production halls and balances earthwork. The design hopes that this constructed "second nature" will reawaken people's affection for the living world.