Central Park Estate
Location: Zhoushan, Zhejiang, China
Client: Zhejiang Bontai Real Estate Development Co ltd
Building Floor Area: 220,000sqm Site area: 133,000sqm
Completion: Phase one in 2010, Phase two in 2012, Phase three in 2014
Design Team: J Wu, FJ Wang, ZQ Wu, P Li, QS Xue, W Yin, R He, X Nie
Concept:
For many years, the majority part of the site had been under evacuation using explosives to procure stones and earth for local authorities’ landfill needs. It is the LA and the developer’s agreement that the site is to handover for building at a level of 4~6m higher than the surrounding road/streets. Therefore the engineering geological conditions make it hard to do further evacuations in more than half of the site, which means normal basement parking was an big issue. Nevertheless this challenge later turns to be a driving factor for several planning features.
The development is so big that it was divided into 3 phases for construction and handover. During the feasibility and master planning stage, residential product researches have been carried out with marketing and sales teams, a reasonable mixture of products with hierarchies was stipulated. The spectrum of the housing products is so wide that it covers almost all realistic products on market, from low density terraced house at 3 levels to medium-rise flats at 6 levels and to high rise luxury apartment from 18 to 24 levels.
It is all too easy for a large scale residential development to be lacking of sense of neighborhood, the architects sub-divide this gated community into several smaller neighborhoods, using a fish-bone shaped zoning strategy. The segregating densely planted buffers growing from a giant Green aisle wraps up all eight clusters. A typical as such is built upon earth-sheltered aboveground parking, which appears to be basement but naturally-lit through elaborately planned large openings. The Green aisle starts from the gatehouse and ends before the semi-basement clubhouse and the sunken outdoor swimming pool annex.
For the rights of solar access, situations of obstructing and being obstructed have both been computer simulated and third-party checked. For example, an inpatient tower of adjacent acute hospital on the west does seriously affect the master plan, and the middle and primary schools on the north also pose restrictions on the building in the northern part. This tedious exercise was carried out on a window-by-window basis.
Echoing the developer’s marketing strategy, a mixture of styles namely the Art Deco and Mediterranean style was attached to the buildings, through high spec stone cladding over thermal insulation and rain screen, and stucco or stone-texture rendering etc. Particularly among the medium-rise buildings, simple massing works in harmony with concentrated stone curving to add some flavor to a modernist’s Art Deco, while solar thermal collectors (vacuum-tube heat pipes) are installed in tilted array on the roof.