Project Overview

Guanyun Town Center represents a slow lifestyle community for people. The project is in Deqing County, south foot of Mount Mogan, the scenic mountain & tourist destination. The site has beautiful mountain and lake views, including a large golf course nearby, which are rare in the development of the town center. The fusion of traditional Chinese structural details and modern architecture brings a refreshing feeling to the neighborhood.

Organisation

BA

Team

Lead Designer: Feng Sa;
Planning: Bin He, Xiaojing Yu, Xueyang Li, Yanfei Gao, Jian Zhao;
Architecture: Xuan Luo, Chihao Song, Yufei Zhang, Enshuai Zhao, Yan Tang, Guojian Chen;
Structure: Licai Wang, Ziqiu Yu, Yiyi Zhu, Jiahao Xu;
Mechanic: Fengqiang Shen, Ji Zhou, Cunzhen Lv, Chunping Wang, Yiduo Yu, Wang Qiu.

Project Brief

The town planning is based on the skeleton of the historical town’s layout, with the senior college sitting in the middle of the main street. The main street north end connects the residential community, and the south end is the tourists’ gateway. Healthy living programs and community amenities are along the main street. The second-floor terraces and walkways create an interesting street elevation. Those elevated walkways introduce people to the upper floor retail, and form covered walkways for ground level.

Guanyun Town Center is formed by 8 building clusters of various programs. There are 4 plazas and 11 courtyards scattered in the town center, which act as gathering places or landscape viewpoints. The Main Plaza in front of Yi-Le College is the intersection of the vertical and horizontal axis. It’s the main venue designed for festival gathering, plaza dancing and other events. At the south end of main street is the Waterfront Plaza, it has a nice open view. The traditional Chinese garden design here creates a peaceful environment, pavilions and waterfront walkways follow the natural lake bank, sky and trees are reflected in the water. Look further, lake and Mount Mogan are in the background.

Project Innovation/Need

The project’s innovation is focused on using new technique to present the traditional Chinese structural details. The architecture style is clean white walls and black tiles, which present a sense of belonging and intimacy.

The roof design reduces the traditional detailed decor part, uses the modern method of fish scale tiles, with aluminum plates to seal the cornices, make the roof light and clean. The exposed beams use woodgrain aluminum panels instead of wood, which preserve the traditional style and ensure durability at the same time. For street elevation, the enlarged details of the rafters, hangings and lattice windows, makes the overall look more modern.

Design Challenge

The big challenge started from the project beginning. The population of the town center is targeted in three parts: families who live in town, residents of Deqing County and tourists. The design team conducted interviews, questionnaires and online surveys for a better understanding of the demand of on-site programs. There’re 821 valid questionnaires collected. After a careful analysis, the four main sections of the town center are finalized - Senior living (Yi-Le college), community amenities, healthy living facilities, and featured resort.

Then to fit the 38 different types of programs within 9,000 sq meters building areas while establishing a clean sequence, is another big challenge. The design team conducted case studies of the traditional Chinese college and the traditional layout plan of historical towns, then proposed the project layout plan. The vertical axis is ‘mountain to college to water’, in front of the college, the main street is the horizontal axis, which aligns all the other programs in sequences: Landscape zone, college zone, hospitality zone.

Sustainability

The project is built at foot of mountain, to best preserve the water body and trees was the major sustainable approach.