Waterfront Eating place, Yuan Xiang Lake
Location: Jia Ding District, Shanghai, China
Client: Jia Ding New Town Development Co ltd
Building Floor Area: 1,500sqm Site area: 2,500sqm
Completion: 2012
Design Team: J Wu, P Li, R He
This project has gained publications by several major professional web presses, such as: Dezeen, Archdaily, Archello, A as Architecture, Architizer
Concept
To build on this Lakeside greenfield that is a part of a Park, the architects opt to subdue the building and let the landscape dominating. The essence is to literally lift-up the green layer of the park and insert building functions beneath, by which means the public domain remains uninterrupted by private use. The spherical roof offers the park visitors a short-cut to the main bridge, and also a privilege venue overlooking the Lake, which, in real life, has been loved by the visitors and particular the photographers who very often shoot panoramas of the Park from this point. As a result, many of their photos look like similar.
In addition, those roof top flora-beds planted with various colours can make an interesting collage from the highrise-living residents’ point of view.
While the building volume particular the service area has a minimum exposure towards the main road, the customer area, dining hall gains maximum visual contact with the lake. Rather, the dining area resembles a ‘theater’, except that the bigger rather than the smaller end is the ‘stage’, where the scene is ‘performing’ through a 30meter long full-height curvy window. The floor of dining hall split into three levels linked by ramps and steps, two sided by clustered boxes (private room) with view to the stalls (dining hall) and to enclosed patios planted with bamboo and paved with gravel. To retain intimacy with the water, the lowest floor level is set 900mm above regional flood level. This area is bridged with an even lower platform standing in a read pond, which is not only to be used as an outdoor dining area, but also the third exit and meeting point in times of emergency.
The management office is lifted to a mezzanine above the service counter and this room with tilted roof and cladded with standing-seam zinc panels is perhaps the only statement made to the public attention – this is a commercial building after all. The kitchen and ancillary rooms are laid into the split-level basement, which is served through a service compound sunken from the street level and well hidden from the public attention. For this area, a footbridge is designed for evacuation, emergency and logistic access.
The roof top flora beds are not only a child of visual requirement, but also of effort to discourage suspended ceilings by reversing beams upwards to achieve explosion of thermal mass. In joint with the configuration of louver-shaded ventilation tower, the lower level open-able panels on the huge window, this is to enable night-cooling with the aid of stack effect. The overall envelope features roof with 800mm earth fill over XPS insulation and external wall with sandwich-type insulation between fair-faced in-situ concrete.