2010 ASLA Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park

文献来源：Kongjian Yu, 2010 ASLA Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park[J].LANDSCAPE WORLD, 2010(33):46-53

This is a park of 22 hectares (54 acres) inthe northern coastal city of Tianjin, China. Rapid urbanization had changed a peripheral shooting range into a garbage dump and drainage sink for urban stormwater; the sitewas heavily polluted, littered, deserted, and surrounded with slums and temporary rickety structures, which had been torn down before the design was commissioned. Thesoil is quite saline and alkaline. Densely pop-ulated at the south and east boundaries, thesite is bounded on the west and north sides by a highway and an overpass.

The overall design goal for this project is to create a park that can provide a diversity of nature's services for the city and the surrounding urban residents, including containing and purifying urban stormwater; improvingthe saline-alkali soil through natural process-es; recovering the regional landscape withlow-maintenance native vegetation; provid-ing opportunities for environmental education about native landscapes and natural sys-tems,stormwater management,soil improvement, and landscape sustainability; and cre-ating a cherished aesthetic experience.

The regional landscape is flat and was once rich in wetlands and salt marshes,which had been mostly destroyed by decades ofurban development and infrastructure con-struction. Though it is difficult to grow trees in the saline-alkali soil, the ground cover and wetland vegetation are rich and varyin response to subtle changes in the water table and PH values.

Inspired by the adaptive vegetation communities that dotted the landscape in this region, a solution for this park was developed called the Adaptation Palettes,which was designed to let nature work. A simple landscape regenerative design strategy was devised, one that included digging 21 pond cavities varying from 10 to 40 meters in diameter, and from one to five meters in depth. The garbage was handled in the earth work. Some cavities are below ground level and some above on mounds.

Within some of the cavities are wood platforms that allow visitors to sit right in the mid-dle of the vegetation patches. A network of red-colored asphalt was designed to weave through the palettes and allow visitors to stroll through the patchy landscape. Along the paths is an environmental interpretation system that gives descriptions of natural pat-terns, processes, and native species.

This project helps to define the new aesthetics of landscape today, defined by a continu-ously evolving process. Untidy forms, unplanned biodiversity and nature's 'messiness'keep going, letting plants live and expose their genuine beauty to enrich the landscape. The ecology-driven Adaptation Palettes has become a valuable and remarkable site of the community of Tianjin.