Linking Urban Space: Yiwu Greentown Xiaofeng Yinyue Garden | 9M Design

Linkage is simply the glue of the city. It is the act by which we unite all the layers of activity and resulting physical form in the city…. urban design is concerned with the question of making comprehensible links between discrete things. As a corollary, it is concerned with making an extremely large entity comprehensible by articulating its parts.

——Finding Lost Space, Roger Trancik

Existing Environments

The project is located at the intersection of Chengbei Road and North Jiangbin Road in Yiwu. It is a highly mature downtown area that adjacent to the CBD and IBD. It is only one street away from Jiangbin Park, enjoying rich natural resources.

Both Chengbei Road and North Jiangbin Road are arterial roads with a number of business buildings, big markets, and residential clusters on the sides. The massive volume of the roads makes it a vehicle-first environment. The surrounding buildings have poor linkage, and the high-rise business buildings on the north side are so different from the old residential buildings on the south side, each building became an isolated island. Although the area is massive, the urban architecture and landscape could not show the characteristics well.

The site is long and narrow, cut into 5 pieces by the urban roads and walk sides. How to build a high-class and livable community on the basis of these conditions became the main challenge for our team.

Urban-friendly Mixed-use Format

On the north side of the site is Yiwu Small Commodities International Trade Market while on the south side is Xingzhong Village, which is a famous Headgears Commodities Market in Yiwu. Sandwiched between two big markets, it requires 4 roads to pass through the middle of the site, making it open to the city as much as possible.

Based on the current environment, our team decided to construct a high-rise residential building that could not only embrace the city but also activate the urban space. The ground floor is totally open to the city, bringing people and businesses in, and constructing an urban-friendly community. The core of Urban-friendly is to repair the separated space, to share the common resources with the residents, returning the space to the city.

A Commercial Ground Floor and Residential Upper Floors

Peter Cook came out with Plug-in City project in 1946. This provocative project suggests a hypothetical fantasy city, containing modular residential units that “plug in” to a central infrastructural mega-machine. The Plug-in City is in fact not a city, but a constantly evolving megastructure that incorporates residences, transportation, and other essential services--all movable by giant cranes. The point is to bring more possibilities to urban regeneration based on the harmony between architecture and the environment.

As an international commercial city, the urban interface of Yiwu has been having a deep linkage with its commercial environment. Individual and private economy embedded into the urban growth system of Yiwu, which brings the tradition that integrates business and residential in one single building. A commercial ground floor of the residential buildings is one of the characteristics of Yiwu. Based on this traditional background, our team started to think that what kind of residential cluster and community mode could fully link the site with the surroundings, promote self-growth and self-improvement ability, and activate the whole area.

The point of our strategy is to construct several unbounded living scenes that grow vertically and extend outward. Urban roads were set between the gray space, turning the narrowness of the site into its advantage. Four 7-meter-long paths are set, linking the trade market and the village, plugging the site into urban roads totally. A double-ground-floor design is adopted in order to respond to the city while satisfying all kinds of needs. The first ground floor is returned to the city, and the second ground floor is for the residents.

Elevated Garden, Vertical Space

“Elevated garden and multilevel community” is taken as our project vision. The residential zone is lifted up by the 400-meter-long base, saving a continued green space on the second ground floor for all kinds of activities while keeping the first ground as a commercial street. The elevated green space is the main leisure zone for the residents as well as a place to promote communication between residents and the city.

Relaxed and Free Architectural Language

The surrounding buildings have not been linked into an organic architectural net because of the differences in their age and style, as well as the lacking of a holistic urban planning strategy. The 7 high-rise buildings could only line up on this L-shaped site. This format itself has the so-called urban style, which enjoys the urban landscape on all sides.

The whole decided that the impact of the buildings could not be too simple and boring. A free multi-directional façade is adopted to make an abundant shape. The facade breaks the traditional symmetry. It is composed of metal plates, metal grilles, double-layer frames, and horizontally drawn glass surfaces. The contrast between virtual and real facades is controlled by the proportion of balconies.

Epilogue

The multilevel construction strategy tries to link the living space and the urban space together, which is an attempt of residential construction in a highly concentrated city. It may not be the best living form, but it must be a solution tailored to local conditions.