TOWER IN THE PARK: SHANGHAI
The proposed intervention for Shanghai occupies the spaces surrounding the Shimao Riviera, a collection of luxury 50 to 60 story apartment towers surrounded by lush landscaping along the Huangpu river just south of the main skyscraper zone in Pudong.
The design is motivated by a contrast; a contrast between the intimacy and activity of street life in traditional Chinese housing and the vacant, static, underutilized open spaces of today’s tower in the park developments. Currently, the buildings sit alone in the landscape; my intervention proposes a low mat of buildings that densify in areas of more sunlight availability and get shorter in places where they sit in the shadow of the existing buildings. That mat is subdivided into areas for infrastructure at ground level, retail and commercial space on the first floor, and residential space above.
At the upper levels, the open space is re-inserted with a series of bridges that create meandering open spaces at different levels. The previously static and underutilized open space at the bottom is moved to the network of rooftop spaces that encourage wandering and individual programming; the unique density of the site and the city as well as the new mix of programs allows for the multilayered ground to be constantly activated
