Youth Plaza is located on the bank of the Min River, at the “golden point” of Fuzhou’s historical and cultural axis. This is a unique location in the “Heart of the Min River” with a 360-degree view of the entire surrounding area.
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Fuzhou Youth Plaza Urban Renewal
Public Landscape Architecture (Built)
Firm
Shanghai AMJ architecture and urban planning Co., Ltd
Architect/Designer
Minghua Xue, Lin Wang
Design Team
Xutan Wang, Congxiong Yang, Shengli Lu, Hewei Shen, Yi Qi, Xueqian Ding, Yifan Yao, Na Zhou
Location
Fuzhou, Fujian, China
Country
China
Photographer/Copyright
©AMJ
The parking lot on the west side of the site before the renovation occupied a large amount of the riverfront area, resulting in an obvious fault line between the historic scenic area and the waterfront space, making it difficult for people to reach the riverside for scenic views. In order to strengthen the connection between the waterfront space and the historical district, we designed a continuous and complete viewing platform. We linked the Jiefang Bridge, the YMCA building, the surface parking lot, and Cangxia Park, and built a new pedestrian bridge at the entrance of Cangxia Park. The original surface parking lot is designed and transformed into a mulch parking lot, and the landscape platform is designed to connect with the waterfront space through landscape sloping treatment, forming a multi-level platform system.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Before the renovation, the parking lot on the west side of the YMCA building occupied a large amount of the riverfront area, and the flood control wall blocked the flow of people, resulting in an obvious fault line between the historical and cultural style district and the waterfront space, making it difficult for people to reach the riverside for viewing. At the same time, the square terrace in front of the historic building blocks a large number of historic buildings. These problems lead to the lack of vitality of the original space, poor pedestrian experience and incomplete presentation of the historical landscape. Therefore, how to cleverly use the existing height difference and integrate landscape, usage function and historical style became the key of this design.
MULTI-LEVEL SLOPE-BASED PLATFORM SYSTEM
In order to truly activate the linked Min River waterfront space, we have linked the Jiefang Bridge, the YMCA building, the surface parking lot, and Cangxia Park, and built a new pedestrian bridge at the entrance of Cangxia Park to connect the historical district with the waterfront space.
In front of the YMCA building, we used accessible ramps and grass slopes to solve the height difference in the site. The plaza is designed to give way to the historic buildings as much as possible in order to fully reveal its appearance. In addition, a citizens’ post is created inside the landscape platform, and the design of the post refers to the style of the YMCA’s historical buildings.
MULTI-LEVEL SLOPE-BASED PLATFORM SYSTEM
The most innovative design in this planning is to use the space of the waterfront embankment and combine the space topography and landscape environment to design an intelligent green slope parking lot.We address the parking needs of the area, while hiding its functions deep in the waterfront landscape. The parking lot is set up without affecting the overall landscape effect, but also creates a spatial feature of a large grass slope. The unique design of the large grass slope integrates the parking space requirements and also restores the natural ecological grass slope features, strengthening the restoration of the natural environment.At the same time, advanced AGV intelligent parking technology is introduced in the parking lot under the green slope.