Xiging District Housing

TIANJIN, CHINA, 2010

Our plan creates a place that is at once porous and buffered. Although easy access to the pathways and buildings of the residential community will be partially restricted and vehicles will be highly controlled, we have left open the possibility for movement across the site for people on foot. This is a place at once too large and too urban to completely restrict outsiders and we have established major means of pedestrian circulation across the site. However, because of the preponderance of unsympathetic uses currently on the periphery, we have created a green filter all the way around the site, engaging the existing canal on the east and providing wide swaths of planting as visual, physical, and acoustic barriers on other sides. To the north and south, we have suggested that commercial, recreational, public and green uses be emphasized.

We have also proposed an architecture that we hope will make this site not simply a beautiful, practical, and enjoyable place but a true design landmark. The buildings we have proposed are dramatic and highly variegated in size and individual texture, a range that will give this place an authentically urban feel. Should we be given the opportunity to further develop this project, we will pursue additional strategies for creating variety and difference, including subtle modulations of texture and shape to conduce a sense of neighborhood and individuality within the larger project as well as a very careful regime of landscaping and the addition of community, commercial, recreational, artistic, and other exceptional elements.

Credits: M. Okazaki, M. Sorkin, Y. Sun, L. Yin.