In the city of Ordos, virtually every block and every street has a public park, so that green spaces and recreational areas for residents wrap around the residential buildings on all four sides. One of the reasons for this is that it is a relatively recently built city. According to Wikipedia, “After the preliminary work of planning, demonstration and approval, the construction of the new district [of Kangbashi] officially started and was mainly carried out in three stages: from 2004 to 2007, the infrastructure construction stage; from 2007 to 2011, the above-ground project construction stage; from 2011 to 2015, the project construction perfection stage”. Well, among the parks and green areas of this city, the latest and probably the most beautiful addition is the Shijie Square Park. As defined by PLAT Asia, the architecture and landscape architecture studio responsible for its design, it is “an all-people-friendly smart sports park“.
Shijie Square, which covers almost 20 hectares, is surrounded by numerous residential and office buildings, a school and an exhibition centre. However, before the construction of the new park, although the site had a few public facilities and several sports fields, “the lack of a rational configuration” condemned it to remain an unwelcoming and inefficient green area. This was one of the reasons why the authorities decided to renovate the park and hired the PLAT Asia studio to do so. From that moment on, the idea that guided the work of the studio and Bian Baoyang, lead designer and co-founder, was “translating” the “unique and co-existing” local landscape of the desert, steppe and Yellow River basin “into a spatial experience in the park”. The second reason was to “to satisfy the necessity [of citizens] of increasing seeks for a healthy lifestyle using the public place”.
Indeed, the tracks running through the Shijie Square Park recall the capricious course of the Yellow River, and with their pale blue colour suggest the reflection of the sky on serene watercourses; at the same time, the shading system, with small curved pavilions, reminds us of the desert dunes; finally, the green spaces of the park maintain “the character of woodland pasture in the Ordos”.
In addition, the park meets this demand for rationality with a layout that groups the facilities “by age and habit of exercise” into five groups:
- One that brings together the “comprehensive ball courts areas”, including several football, basketball, tennis, badminton and table tennis courts, “which satisfy the multiple activity scenes in professional and leisure”.
- A children’s playground with adventure rides at the centre of the park.
- A circuit for the youngest children’s bicycles.
- A comprehensive exercise area for the elderly.
- And the existing area of fronton courts, which in the new park are suitable for professional fronton matches.
In addition, there are “alkaline soil area which is not available to planting”, which function as sand pits in summer and skating rinks in winter, and a shallow swimming pool with a fountain for children’s bathing and water games.
However, it is the “management platform system to operate and interact with people” that qualifies Shijie Square Park as “intelligent”. This system includes a lighting control device, traffic monitoring on the tracks, an information system to guide visually impaired people, water purification equipment, and solar-powered charging stations under the shaded canopies. It only remains to add, beyond a gallery of images that speak for themselves, that PLAT Asia carried out the renovation of the Ordos Smart Sports Park “under the control of a strict budget“.
Source: Gooood.cn, PLAT Asia, Wikipedia. Images: Holi Landscape Photography via Gooood.cn.
