Xi'an Yannan Park City Balcony

Project Profile

1. Project Statement

The city balcony is mainly located at the border of Yannan Park, with a total length of about 3,000 meters, which is mainly composed of the raised footpath, the main garden road, the running path, and the gravel forest square. The venue carries a variety of urban service functions, including urban image display, cultural gatherings, leisure and entertainment, and walking experience. The design team expects that in the future the project site can host a variety of urban service functions. Therefore, based on the different population distribution and land use nature around the site, the city balcony is divided into commercial leisure section, which provides the surrounding commercial space with leisure activities, community life section, which provides the surrounding residents with daily community activities, and dynamic cultural and creative section, which provides the residents with daily leisure and cultural and creative display places. In addition, according to the functional requirements of different sections, the design team also planned and designed five landscape pavilions with different functional characteristics, which are comprehensive service landscape pavilion, commercial landscape pavilion, children's activity landscape pavilion, community leisure landscape pavilion and multi-functional cultural and creative landscape pavilion.

2. Objective and Challenge

The design goal of this project is to use new landscape design methods and concepts to create an urban balcony in the bustling city, to meet the needs of Xian residents to relax after work and get close to nature.

Challenge 1: The current terrain of the site changes greatly, and there is a large amount of construction waste piled up, and there is a large height difference with the surrounding roads. How to construct the activity space suitable for the surrounding site is a major challenge of this project.

Challenge 2: Xian has a serious water shortage problem. The project only relies on the Zao River, but the water in the Zao River has serious pollution problems. In this case, how to create a place close to nature is another challenge of the project.

Challenge 3: There are various functional areas around the site, and meeting the activity needs of people in different areas is the third design difficulty of the project.

Challenge 4: How to create a new urban image for Xian, a city with a rich history and culture, is the fourth design difficulty of the project.

3. Design Strategy

Ecological sponge strategy - The site pavement selects environmentally friendly infiltration materials, builds ecological permeable surface layer, solves the drainage problem of pavement, and increases the ecological water replenishment capacity of the site. Landscape engineering approach was adopted to adjust the ground slope and design ecological storm drains and storage ponds. The spongy facilities such as permeable surface layer, ecological storm drain and storage pond are planned and organized as a whole to form a complete ecological sponge system.  While solving the problem of rainwater infiltration and drainage on the site, it provides habitat for insects, birds and wetland organisms, and strengthens the restoration of natural habitat system of the project plot.

Functional recombination strategy - Based on the current terrain and functional needs of the site, a variety of activities are planned, including children's activities, small performances, community activities, parent-child games, etc.  Based on the needs of different types of activities, the corresponding activity space is designed. In different activity Spaces, unified service facilities are set up to meet the needs of basic service functions.

Module design strategy - The seats and landscape structures in the site are uniformly planned and designed to ensure the consistency of the overall style of the site. The design team also adopted a modular design concept, using simple and fixed-size monomers to build a relatively flexible service facility. This modular design method not only has a very fast construction speed, but also can carry out new arrangement and combination of module monomer after completion, so as to create a new effect. This allows different users in the future to make appropriate adjustments to the service facilities based on the specific situation of the site and their own use needs.

4. Conclusion

Based on the current situation of the site, the design scheme uses ecological landscape design methods to build an urban balcony at the intersection of the city and the park. It not only provides an activity space close to nature for urban residents, but also creates a new image of a modern ecological livable city for Xian.