Masterplanning the Adaptive City

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TOM VEREBES

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Client: Shenzhen Planning Institute
Design Team: Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez, Eduardo Rico, Holger Kehne,
(Groundlab Directors), Alejandra Bosch, Clara Oloriz, Maria Paez, Brendon
Carlin
Deep Ground is a winning competition entry for an international design
competition for Longgang Centre and Longcheng Square, northeast of Shenzhen,
involving an estimated population of 350,000 and 9,000,000 square meters of
proposed new development on 11.8 square kilometers of mixed urban fabric in the
centre of Longgang. The project radically expands the scope of urbanism to deal
with the contemporary challenges of modern China. Through this project and the
workshops that took place with the local authorities and other organizations in
Shenzhen, a significant understanding of both the local and global conditions 
in China enabled the development of a series of concepts that condensed the
different issues and agents involved into a set of operative design tools that
shaped three main strategies. These design strategies are specific to the local
requirements in Shenzhen and can be understood also as responses with a certain
degree of typicality, addressing conditions that are symptomatic of the top-down,
centrally controlled urbanization process found today throughout China. Through
the concept of a “thickened ground,” multiple ground datums are fused to foster
intuitive orientation and connectivity. Via a second strategy, of an “infrastrucutural
landscape,” the polluted and neglected river is projected to become an ecological
corridor, while the existing urban villages are retained to form nucleuses to lend
identity, vitality, and human scale to the new development. Lastly, the project
develops a strategy of spatial, typological, and programmatic differentiation from 
a parametric modeling methodology.
CASE STUDY
GROUNDLAB >DEEP GROUND:
REGENERATION MASTERPLAN
FOR LONGGANG CENTER 
AND LONGCHENG SQUARE,
SHENZHEN, CHINA
2008

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238
GROUNDLAB
A computational method of varying the typology, density, height, and footprint of massing is
demonstrated in these two instances. 

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239
DEEP GROUND: REGENERATION MASTERPLAN
Demonstration of environmental systems deployed in the masterplan.

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GROUNDLAB
Aerial view of the
proposed masterplan,
indicating the variety
of massing and its
adaptability to local
contextual conditions.

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Design Team: Christopher Lee, Bolam Lee, Martin Jameson, Kapil Gupta, Suril
Patel, Stephie Sun, Charlotte Sue
Models: Joseph Halligan, Michelle Young, Fung Tsui
Serie Architects, alongside Grimshaw of London and Pysall Ruge Arkitekten of
Berlin, was selected to renovate and design four large disused factories in
Hangzhou, with Serie and Pysall Ruge designing one of the four factories each,
and Grimshaw the remaining two. The 7,680-square-meter project for the adaptive
reuse of factory to commercial and offices faced several conflicting demands. For
the project to be economically viable, an insertion of floor areas totalling four
times its original footprint would have to be accommodated. On the other hand, 
to fill up the factory would completely diminish its most unique feature—its
sixteen-meter-high volume. Thus the main concern was to preserve the main hall
of the factory as a spectacular internal volume and to accentuate the industrial
drama of this massive void. The supporting programs—shops, restaurants, bars
and creative offices—are placed in a surrounding plinth. This plinth acts as a
device to emphasize the main factory building: in one sense it frames the factory,
in another sense it serves as a pedestal above which we come face to face with the
factory. The top surface of the plinth gently undulates and is punctured with green
patios and water bodies, constituting an abstraction and re-reading of the natural
landscape of Hangzhou. 
CASE STUDY
SERIE ARCHITECTS >XIN TIAN
DI FACTORY H, HANGZHOU,
CHINA
2010

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