Nanjing: The Latest Architecture and News

Ennead Architects has unveiled the plans for its new project, the Qilin Technology Innovation Park, located in Nanjing, China. The 468,000 square meter project seeks to give a new direction to Chinese urbanism, as it moves away from the trend of “individual architectural trophies,” and towards “creating a holistic district identity and memorable urban space on a human scale.”

Inspired by Silicon Valley, the new science and technology district will create a “24-7 mixed-use urban research hub,” with commercial and government office space, conference facilities, residential buildings, hotels, retail environments, and public open space.

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“We have to try to work with scale and memory. I think in the last twenty years the main problem is that we lost the 归宿感 [sense of belonging]. The people here have been moving from house to house for a long time, the result is that we don’t have a feeling of home… even if you are staying in a nice house or villa you don’t consider it as an ideal or permanent home where you could stay. This might be considered the problem. More than ten years ago we used to have that feeling, the sense to belong to a specific space. We used to live in neighbourhoods where we had a social background, a community, now you don’t have any community, you don’t see the neighbors any more. Now Chinese people are becoming lonely, they are losing that feeling and becoming 'homeless'.” - Zhang Lei, Nanjing, 2013

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Construction has begun on the new Nanjing Jianye District office tower in China. Designed by UDG China, the multi-level complex will house hundreds of government workers throughout almost 100,000 square meters of office space.

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Steven Holl Architects has shared with us an impressive gallery of images of their recent project, Nanjing’s Sifang Art Museum. Rising above the lush landscape of the Pearl Spring, the new museum was designed as a physical manifestation of the parallel perspective, a technique prevalent in early Chinese paintings. From a subtly distorted courtyard with no vanishing points to an upper level gallery with calculated views and pristine light, the experience through the Sifang Art Museum is unlike any other.

See for yourself, after the break... 

Steven Holl has, again, teamed up with Spirit of Space to produce two short films on the recently completed Sifang Art Museum. In the first video (above) Holl explains the project’s inspiration - the mysteries of parallel perspective seen in early Chinese paintings - and how the design subtly distorts any concept of a vanishing point at the ground level yet contrasts this notion in the upper galleries by framing the distant view of Nanjing. In the second video (after the break), Spirit of Space allows you to experience this space by revealing it from all perspectives and scales.

See the second video, after the break…

Ma Yansong of MAD recently presented a 600,000 square meter urban design proposal for the city of Nanjing titled, "Shanshui Experiment Complex," at the 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture in Shenzhen, China. The concept takes into account the culture, nature and history of Nanjing while reconsidering the methodology in which Chinese cities are built.

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