A Walk In The Tunnel Of China's Past

Walking in the tunnel like park, with the local vegetation growing freely under the natural sunlight, you will feel your exhausted body has gone through a cleansing process, both of your soul and your body undergoing a relaxing experience. The little moon river is flowing quietly adjacent to the Tuchen Relic Park, which has been standing there for the past seven hundred years. This is the vision Turenscape brought to the board of communities for the Olympic Park related project of Yuandadu Historic Relic Park. Turenscape’s design stands out of 6 competition submissions for this international competition. It has won the second place. “To avoid the two extremes, we should try not to copy, and no matter how good the relics was, current structure does not have to mimic everything old. Second, and try not to borrow too much from the western designs. Due to the fact, that current Chinese structural design also has its significance and cultural relations to the land. Architecture should respect the local culture as well as the natural surrounding, the human usage, the time and the life styles of the locals.” Said by Professor Kongjian Yu. For modern Chinese architecture and landscape architecture to become a style of its own, what is important is the culture sense, not just copying or mimicking the tradition; regional features and traditional styles are two different yet interacted concepts that need to be taken into consideration. Various regional features of a given place together composite the tradition over a long time, at the same times the culture is being transformed. For example, the Chinese Sloped Roofline. Area tradition subjects to several factors, one is that you have to know the lifestyles of the locals, which define the corresponding forms of architecture, this is what we call a cultural landscape. Second, you have to know the weather condition as well as the natural surrounding. Third, what type of technology and raw materials is available determines the type of structure that could be built. In the past, the limitation has been drawn due to the materials that were available at the time; we rarely see expansion distances longer than 12 feet. Now with the technological advance, we can build expansions as long as needed, such as stadium. However, Overusing this technology with out a necessary cause will result in other problems, opinioned by Professor Yu. Professor Yu also talks about what decides a regional sense of unity in the landscape. For example what is the ecological sense, what is the most efficient way to use both the energy and resources to achieve the purpose from a good design. When we judge whether a design is creative or ecological, efficiency should be what we base everything on. This efficiency is achieved by the way the natural resources is being used in the process for such a design, and the number of recyclable material taken into consideration. Based on the above understanding, Turenscape designed a solution for the Yuandadu Historic Relic Park, with the idea of basing on the culture and designing a walkway of time, tradition, and significance to the local people.