Magma is the Inspiration — A Look at a Chinese Park Built to Avoid Obesity
Landscape architecture is often overlooked in the world of architecture — but it can be a very powerful tool for enhancing any part of architecture, small communities, and large cities. This project is a perfect example of that power.
Today’s showcase takes us all the way to China, Ordos, China to be exact, in the Kangbashi District. Within this district there are two major education institutions: Kangbashi №9 Primary School, and on the west side is Ordos Applied Technology College. To the north of both of these places is a natural red sandstone slope.
Surrounding these two institutions are residential areas and the typical things you would find in any district, but one crucial thing was missing: outside leisure activity venues.
So the design team, called Daikosha Architectural Design, looked at the existing site conditions and resources aiming to combine environmental characteristics while taking into consideration nature, sustainability, and national fitness. Luckily the project is located near transportation making the site easily accessible to not just walkable adjacent areas, but a greater population.
National fitness is a development plan formulated by China to promote leisure and fitness participation, enhance people’s physiques, improve the people’s health level, and to realize the general goal of building a strong sports country.
This unique local red sandstone forms a red line that is approximately 30,000 square meters. The complex terrain and large elevation differences within the site provided an immense challenge, but it lead to a fantastic concept.
The design inspiration came from magma on the surface. As the red sandstone is as red as fire, they used parametric design to fracture and organize the surface, trying to express the characteristic of geomorphology…
