Deep Dive Rowing Club

In order to promote and support China's rowing sport for a long term, Vanke Education Group, in collaboration with Shanghai Pudong New District, planned to build a small rowing club in Century Park to organize rowing training and activities for more youth and teenagers. Having 200 trainees each year with 20 to 30 every month, the club needs to store approximately 15-20 rowing boats and provide training & activity rooms, lockers&showers, toilets and seating areas for adolescents. The club will conduct daily training and technical instruction and also open to parents and rowing enthusiasts. Century Park is the largest wetland park open to the public in downtown Shanghai. The Zhangjiabang River, which can be partially used for rowing training, is an urban river that crosses the park in a rough width of 35m. Rowing athletes face the opposite direction of advancing when paddling. Due to the considerations of safety and speed change, we set up the club at the bend point of the river with a coveto facilitate two-way departures and arrivals. The site was covered withdensely planted metasequoia forest, leaving only a 4-meter-wide old pier on the shore. In order to minimize the impact on the original environment, we divided usable spaces into four parts: the pieris located on the south side of the cove, the activity room is placed on the west side of the river, and the changing room is built on the old pier site. The boathouse is then the only part of the project that needs to occupy the existing forest. To avoid large-scale felling or transplanting, we split the boathouse into three thin strips scattering in the forest, roughly corresponding to the direction of the new pier. The rowing boats have 4 kinds in size for singles, doubles, fours and eights. The length is about 8-18m and the width is only 30-60cm. The width of the “small home” we designed for the boats is limited to accommodateonly one boat yet with four floors, and the length is a combination of the boat length modules. In order to reduce the impact of on-site construction in the park, the structural foundations of the boathouses consist of prefabricated point-likeconcrete blocks. The column composed bytwo bolted angle steel, is forked in the upper part like a tree to form a “Y” to support double pitched canopy. On the lower part four “branches”cantileveredfrom the column serve the rowing boat storage. The slender boathouses are completely open with only necessary roof shelter, making the boat carrying a weight-bearing walk in the forest. The pier is located at the boundary between the river and the cove on the south side of the base. The pier floatsin the water andis fixed with pipe pilesby embracing pulleys. It is covered with plastic wood panels and supported by bundles of buoys. Serving both sides, the pier connects to the shore through a 5. 5-meter-wide ramp to the boathouse area, and to the passage between the activity room and the changing roomthrough a small ladder. Both the ramp and the ladder are connected by hinges to comply with the fluctuation of the water level. The activity room in the river is a waterfront pavilion like“a boat not tied”. The bottom is barge-like rectangular steel grating on pipe piles driven into the riverbed. The cover is a 20-meter-long double-pitched roof, supported only by twin steel H-pillars at both ends - this gives freedom and access to the space: between the H-pillars is the door towards exteriorplatforms, between the twin beams on the pillars becomes the passage for the skylight. The east side of the activity room is adjacent to the changing room. An eight-meter-long cabinet divides these two spaces, the front is for storage, the rear is awriting board, and the two ends contain the air-conditioners. The other three sides of the activity room are facing the riverfront; on west side three sets of foldable sliding windows provide complete openness to the outside. Below the sliding windows is a longand wide wooden sill that can be seated, making this boundary space a place for rest, communication, and viewing. It also established a visual connection between indoor ergometer training and rowing training in the river. We not only allow the pavilionto open itself to the surroundings, but also give it a special identity through its position in the water and a slightly lower floor elevation in comparison with the riverbank. To enterthe pavilion requires three steps down from the entrance, it is yet until placing yourself inside this calm space that you start to perceive the merge with thenature outside. In this circulation system, we paid special attention to the outdoor area. Apart from the tall metasequoia trees, there are also abundant shrubs, flowers, vegetation, and small animals such as squirrels and turtles that often move between forests and riversides. In order to reduce interfering their environment, we used wood plank paving only on the way to the building entry, butmake permeable paths in the area of the boathouses. Along the paths we array 600 small concrete blocks as individual dots, on which stainless steel grills were placed as trails. These transparent walkways still allow plants to grow between them, and keep rooms for the small animals. We hope that this club will not only help the promotion and development of the rowing sport, but also be able to exert a subtle influence on the establishment of teenagers’ ecological idea through a friendly relationbetween architecture and natural environment.