Industrial Strength——Zhongshan Shipyard Park

During the past half century, China has lived through a period of extraordinary change. In just over 50 years, the country has been transformed from a semifeudal society dominated by foreign interests to an economic superpower exerting claims to authority in the world. The nation has lived through revolution, famine, waves of massive centralization and decentralization, isolationism, and entry into the World Trade Organization. The Chinese record of lifting people out of extreme poverty is unequaled in world history. This dizzying history has created major social discontinuities.

The misery of periods like Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward," in which millions starved, and violent episodes like the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square have left the Chinese people with historical blind spots. Although these events are within the personal experience of many, there is a collective effort to banish them from memory. The result is a cultural split personality. People are enamored with things that are modern and international, and they show great respect for elements that are seen as classically Chinese, but much of twentieth century Chinese history has become forbidden territory. This atmosphere poses particular challenges for landscape architects. A designer can appropriate elements of classical Chinese gardens and assemble them into landscapes that resemble the popular image of a traditional design. Or a designer can transpose elements from projects in other parts of the world and provide a completely contemporary solution. Either approach might satisfy the client, but the resulting design solution is divorced from context and offers little more than decorative content.

When seen in the light of these conventions, the award-winning Zhongshan Shipyard Park is a groundbreaking project for contemporary Chinese landscape architecture. Professor Kongjian Yu and his team from Turenscape took the risk of rejecting popular attitudes toward design and created a new approach that acknowledges and incorporates the recent past The 25-acre park combines historical, contemporary, and ecological elements in a place that is both a living memorial to China's recent past and a vibrant part of everyday life in the southern Chinese city of Zhongshan.

As its name implies, the park was created on the site of a former shipyard. Zhongshan is located in Guangdong Province, which lies along the south China Sea and share a border with Hong Kong. The heart of Guangdong Province is the Pearl River Delta. The delta, traditionally a rich agricultural region, is now also home to the largest concentration of manufacturing industries in China. Zhongshan lies in the western part of the region, 86 kilometers south of the provincial capital Guangzhou (formerly Canton). Zhongshan's location on a tributary of the Pearl River made it a natural site for shipbuilding, and the Yuezhong Shipyard was the industrial heart of the city for nearly half a century. At one time, the shipyard was the largest employer in Zhongshan--housing, feeding, and caring for 1,300 workers on the shipyard site.

Zhongshan Shipyard Park was designed as a tribute to the shipyard workers and millions of others who helped to build modern Chinese society. However, there is nothing nostalgic or traditional about the park design. Yu and his team incorporated design elements unknown in traditional Chinese parks and broke with prevailing practice by recycling industrial buildings and other remnants of the old shipyard. The process involved major challenges for Turenscape. The design had to preserve natural habitats while responding to environmental problems that required major alterations in the riverfront along one edge of the park. At the same time, Turenscape had to deal with a governmental design-review committee that had difficulty understanding and accepting the firm's unorthodox approach to the social and cultural aspects of site.

Zhongshan Shipyard Park today is a dramatic melding of local history and the natural environment that has become an integral part of the city's urban fabric. The park offers people a rich variety of experiences. Children and adults play in its fountains, stream, and lake. Elderly people do their morning tai chi exercises on the lawns and plazas. Former shipyard workers relive memories, and students contemplate a history that they know only from books.

I visited the park four times in the course of three days in February. My initial encounter with the park took place under ideal conditions: a sunny, warm Saturday 'afternoon, the last day of the Chinese lunar New Year celebration. Yu and Pang Wei, from Turenscape, met me at the park for a personal tour.

The first thing most visitors see is the main entry, a granite plaza organized around a fountain built of steel plates with notional rivers intended to evoke large steel trusses used in bridge and factory construction. The plates extend into the adjacent paving, creating continuity with the larger plaza area. Bubble jets are located in the spaces created by intersections of the steel plates. Adults and children were playing together in the fountain when we arrived, giving the plaza warm, welcoming feeling despite the industrial character of the design. An artificial stream separates the plaza from the park. The stream provides another place for people to play, masks noise from the adjacent roadway, and creates a transition from the surrounding urban context. Its picturesque effect recalls the use of water in classic Chinese Scholar Gardens, where quiet pools and streams reflect the surroundings and promote contemplation. Boulders are placed at key points in the stream to create bridges to the path system of the park.

 While people do climb over these informal bridges to get into the park, most visitors enter on a broad, paved path past a stand of bamboo at the edge of tile stream. The bamboo marks the park entrance and is a reference to traditional Chinese gardens where bamboo symbolizes nobility. The use of design elements that have multiple meanings is central to Yu's approach. Features throughout the park combine recreational uses with symbolic references to the history of the site and modern China. Yu is deeply aware of the hardships and labor that went into building the society, and he has attempted to infuse the park with that awareness. The railroad path, a striking three meter-wide walkway, stretches a half-mile from the main entry to the lakefront.

Rails and ties laid in the center of the path are highlighted by a bed of white rocks bordered by native grasses and granite walks. The path is the major organizing axis of the park, and it evokes the rails used to move vessels in and out of the water in the shipyard. Children enjoy balancing on the rails while their parents watch from nearby granite walks.

Turenscape's original concept for the railroad path was a broad, straight walkway with strong industrial references that symbolize economic progress in modern China. Members of the local review panel felt that an axial path of this type lacked a sense of climax or focus, and they insisted on placing a grid of 180 slender, white columns at the center point of the railroad path. The columns do focus attention--particularly when uplighted at night--but they are not well integrated into the park design. The grid has a monumental feel more in keeping with 1950's socialist architecture and it lacks any obvious symbolic or historical references.

Not all of the symbolism in the park emphasizes progress in China. The feature that leaves the strongest impression on most visitors is the Red Box, which Yu designed as a room for contemplation of the Cultural Revolution--one of the grimmest periods of recent Chinese history. It is a construction of red-painted steel plates, nine meters square and about three meters high, that enclose reflecting pools. An adjacent marker calls attention to the profound political implications of the color red in China and reminds visitors of some of the famous sayings of Lenin and Mao.

The symbolism may seem heavy-handed to an outsider, but it carries a great deal of weight in a country whose national anthem remains "The East Is Red." The Red Box seems to touch everyone who visits it: Couples pause to embrace inside the space, children run their hands through the water, and elderly people stand and think quietly.

The Green Rooms are another impressive and somewhat unsettling feature of the park. They are areas of about sixteen feet square enclosed in eight-foot vertical hedges and carpeted in lawn, and they provide intimate spaces for reading and relaxation. They are very popular, particularly with young couples looking for privacy. More than two dozen Green Rooms are scattered in the areas around the lake. The intimacy of the Green Rooms also has a disturbing side. Yu designed each room to the dimensions of a workers' dormitory in the old Yuezhong Shipyard. The realization that a dozen workers might have lived for 20 years in a concrete room of this size offers a striking contrast between past and present and a powerful reminder of recent Chinese history. The lakefront offers a different type of experience. The lake, which is connected to the Qijiang River, is subject to daily tidal fluctuations of about 43 inches.

This created a serious problem for Turenscape designers, who wanted to create access to the lakefront regardless of tidal conditions. They met this challenge with a set of bridges that allow lakefront access at all times of the day. The bridges serve as platforms for viewing the rich array of native plants that Turenscape placed along the shoreline. The shoreline also features two pavilions adapted from old shipyard buildings. The buildings were stripped to structural skeletons, reinforced, and repainted.

One now is a red steel skeleton, and the other is white reinforced concrete. The view from inside the pavilions is a framed image of the lake that conveys a strong sense of stillness and tranquility. Many other structures and pieces of equipment from the shipyard also were recycled in the parks. A pair of huge cranes originally used to move ships are a good example. They have been incorporated into gateways on the western and southern edges of the park. The southern gateway combines one of the cranes with park service buildings, and the western gateway joins the other crane to a human-scale sculpture of two shipyard workers. The sculpture is a popular attraction, and visitors come to the gateway to pose with the figures in playful ways.

 Turenscape also used sculpture to transform a notoriously troublesome industrial chimney into an installation piece. Steel scaffolding and bronze figures of workers were added to the chimney to create a memorial to the unknown people who labored to keep the shipyard running for half a century. In some cases, Turenscape built symbolic representations of shipyard structures that had become unsalvageable. A water tower slated to be reused in the park turned out to be unusable, and Turenscape created a new construction mimicking the skeleton of the original tower. The result is a striking, red steel structure that is positioned to create a sight line along one of the paths leading out of the Red Box.

Turenscape followed a similar concept in creating a new museum in the image of an old factory building. Although the original building is gone, Turenscape has recycled its image in the museum and gallery. The biggest piece of construction in the park is an "ecological island" (as it is called in Chinese) created to save a stand of heritage banyan trees. The trees were on the riverbank that forms the eastern boundary of the park. Flooding is a major problem during the summer monsoons in southern China, and there were plans to widen the river and eliminate the trees. Turenscape solved the problem by creating an island in the river separated from the park by a flood-control channel. A lighthouse on the island---created from another old water tower--is visible for several miles and helps to make the park a local landmark.

Many features of the park, such as the ecological island, tile redesigned lakefront, and the native plants, would be modest efforts toward environmentally sensitive design by North American and European standards, but they represent significant advances in Chinese park design. Ecological design is in its infancy in China, where even basic ideas like using local native plants are unknown to most park designers. One of Yu's objectives was to educate the public about these issues and increase local awareness of the region's rich agricultural heritage. Most Chinese parks are fenced and require an admission fee, but Zhongshan Shipyard Park is free of charge and heavily visited by young and old. People in China sometimes say that the ultimate measure of a park is whether couples use the setting for their wedding photographs. On our last Sunday afternoon, a man and wife in wedding dress were posed by the lakeside pavilion, creating their own memorial to a piece of' Chinese history.

The park concept originated in the late 1990s with the deputy mayor of Zhongshan, Peng Jiangwen. After operating for nearly 50 years, the Yuezhong Shipyard was slated to close in 1998, City administrators were attempting to revitalize the downtown area to attract foreign investment, and Peng understood that open space can stimulate property development and tourism. Peng had met Yu at a conference in Beijing, and he decided to contact Turenscape for help. Zhongshan Shipyard Park became a collaboration among the mayor, other city officials, and Turenscape.

 Turenscape is one of the largest landscape architecture firms in China, with 150 employees drawn from backgrounds in architecture, planning, and landscape architecture. The firm's approach is interdisciplinary, and its scope of services covers landscape architecture, urban design, architecture, environmental design, community planning, and ecological planning and design.

Yu received his bachelor's and master's degrees in landscape architecture from Beijing Forestry University and a Doctor of Design (D.DES.) degree from Harvard. He currently teaches at Beijing University, where he is involved in establishing a new graduate school of landscape architecture. The objective of the new program is to upgrade landscape architecture education in China from its traditional status as a branch of agricultural science largely devoted to landscape gardening.

Yu is a native of northeast China, so his first task in the design process was to learn about the history of the site and southern China. He found Zhongshan and the Yuezhong Shipyard to be emblematic of the twentieth-century history of the region and the nation. Zhongshan takes its name from its most prominent native, Sun Yatsen, who is celebrated as the leader of the original revolutionary movement of the 1920s (the name "Zhongshan" is a Mandarin Chinese equivalent of the Cantonese name "Yatsen"). This link to Sun Yatsen is cherished by the population of southern China, and it is an important element of the identity of the city.

Since the days of Sun Yatsen, the area has undergone two major transitions: from traditional agriculture to heavy industry and from heavy industry to modern manufacturing. The shipyard was the core of Zhongshan's industry throughout a large part of this period, operating continuously through the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1970s, and the rapid growth of export manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s. By the late 1990s, the local economy had shifted to producing electronics, and the shipyard became obsolete. When it was operating, the Yuezhong Shipyard was much more than just an employer to the people of Zhongshan. State-owned enterprises like Yuezhong were one of the foundations of the communist society envisioned by Mao, and they became monolithic social institutions that encompassed all aspects of the lives of their employees. Workers lived in dormitories on the shipyard site, they ate in canteens on site, their children were educated in schools run by the shipyard, and they received their medical care in clinics provided by the shipyard.

Yu felt it was vital for the design to preserve continuity with this history, but he did not want to create a park divorced from the contemporary urban fabric of Zhongshan or the modern life of the region and nation. In the social climate of the late 1990s, the comfortable route for Turenscape would have been to design a park that concealed the site's history behind a facade of traditional elements. Instead, Yu chose an approach that encourages contemplation of recent history without glorifying it or denying it.

 At the same time, the Zhongshan city administrators wanted a design sensitive to the natural environment of the site. They recognize that serious environmental degradation has taken place in the region during the last few decades, and they are working to strike a balance between promoting industry and creating a habitable city. Their efforts helped Zhongshan to be designated a Chinese National Garden City and to be awarded the prestigious United Nations Habitat Scroll of Honour for improvement of the urban environment.

 Turenscape faced a number of major challenges at the site. In addition to problems posed by the natural environment, the designers had to deal with badly deteriorated structures and machinery scattered throughout the area. Preservation of the site's historical identity ruled out clearing it, but the abandoned items created major aesthetic and environmental problems. However, some local officials did not appreciate the symbolic significance of these objects and were eager to sell them as scrap.

In response to these challenges, Yu formulated three major objectives: create a park that is part of the urban fabric, accessible to local people and attractive to tourists; promote recognition of the history of the site and the larger history of China during the twentieth century; and preserve any existing ecological value of the site and increase awareness of the rich agricultural heritage of the region. The design review process proved to be demanding and unusual for China. Municipal decision making in China typically resides with a few officials, and design review is carried out with little participation by the general public.

By contrast, the approach adopted by the Zhongshan city administration and Turenscape involved extensive public review and participation. This approach was partially a strategic move by city officials. Deputy Mayor Peng recognized that Turenscape's design was likely to be controversial, and the public review process offered an opportunity to get input from future users of the park and build support for the proposal. The strong local attachment to the memory and ideals of Sun Yatsen also made it easier to undertake a process of this type in Zhongshan; officials like the deputy mayor couId call upon a tradition of political openness that helped to give legitimacy to the approach and encourage participation. The process lasted a year and a half. It was led by Zhongshan officials with the assistance of Turenscape.

 Turenscape presented the plan to community groups, broadcast additional presentations on cable television, and displayed models and plans in public buildings. Although participation was limited by North American standards, it was unparalleled in China. The public received the plan warmly, and former shipyard employees and their families were particularly pleased. However, the local government review panel, which included representatives from public bureaus and design faculty from universities in the area, was less enthusiastic. The panel questioned the purpose of reusing machinery from, the old shipyard and failed to see the point of specifying local plants, which they saw as generally unkempt and lacking ornamental value. Objections also were mounted to the rectilinear path system proposed for the park.

 Typical Chinese park design still follows the model of the Scholar Gardens, in which curving paths symbolize nature. Some panel members saw the straight paths of the Turenscape design as a violation of Chinese garden tradition. Yu worked with members of the review panel to help them understand the design. He showed images of Richard Haag's Gasworks Park in Seattle and Peter Latz's Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park in Duisburg, Germany, and helped to educate the panel in the changing aesthetics of contemporary landscape design. Yu and his team also spent time explaining how old structures and mechanisms retained in the site could be made safe for the general public. After lengthy review of plans and sketches, Turenscape prevailed.

The panel introduced some significant design alterations, but the master plan for the park remained substantially intact. The complexity of the design and limitations of local construction expertise made it necessary for Turenscape to collaborate with the Zhongshan Construction Bureau in building the park. Because political pressures required completion within a single year, Turenscape and the Zhongshan Construction Bureau adopted a design/build approach, often going straight from original sketches and plans to the field. Yu and his team oversaw the construction process and sometimes participated in construction tasks. Their involvement allowed Turenscape to exert a high level of control over quality and facilitated on-site experimentation with details.

The resulting park stands out in China for its standard of construction and quality of detail. Contemporary Chinese parks rarely achieve world construction standards, but Zhongshan Shipyard Park is comparable to high-profile projects in Europe, North America, or Japan. "A small park that tells a big story" is Yu's description of the project. The story it tells is about 50 years of collective struggle to build a new Chinese society. It is also a story about changes in China today, as a new generation of landscape architects take on experiments like the Zhongshan Shipyard Park.

The city of Zhongshan and Turenscape stepped off safe territory when they committed to this design. The commitment is a major one in financial and practical terms--the park cost 50 million yuan for an area of 25 acres (more than $5.75 per square foot). Even more important, it is a commitment to the creation of a new design vocabulary for China. This vocabulary incorporates ideas from across the globe, but it is profoundly Chinese in language and meaning. Park design has been evolving rapidly during the last two decades. Parks like Duisburg-Nord or Parc de la Villette in France offer new models and have helped to pioneer new styles.

Zhongshan Shipyard Park may offer a similar model for China in the twenty-first century--an approach to design that is open to the world, unflinching in its view of recent history, and fundamentally Chinese. Mary G. Padua. ASLA (marygpadua@arch.hku.hk), is assistant professor of landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Hong Kong and author of the forthcoming book Urban Funk (Hong Kong, University Press, 2003). [B]PROJECT CREDITS[/B] Designers: Turenscape and the Center for Landscape Architecture, Beijing University. Kongjian Yu, ASLA, project director and principal designer. Turenscape landscape architects: Pang wei, Huang Zhengzheng, Li Jiang-hong, Lin Shihong, Li Xianghua, Zhang Juang, Hu Haibo, Shi Ying, Sun Peng, and Wang Zhifang. Turenscape architects: Pang Wei, Huang Zhengzheng and Dong Tao. Turenscape artists/sculptors: Qiu Qingyuan,Yie Zhijian,and Yie Jun. Client: City of Zhongshan.