West Lake Park, Chengdu by


2023 Public Projects / China / Built in 2021 /

West Lake Park, Chengdu is a sports and open waterfront park, which is located in Dayi County, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China. The park’s green space provides surrounding residents with an all-weather, all-age leisure destination.

The project, with its superior waterfront scenery, unique wetland scenery, and abundant vegetation resources, lays the foundation for reconstructing an ecological site for dialogue between the public and nature. The designers aimed to promote the return of the site to nature with micro design techniques, endowing the waterfront park with a lively sports concept, creating a vibrant community, providing people with sports and social interaction, ecological science popularization, and achieving multi-dimensional spatial experience, reflecting the innovative, dynamic, and diverse urban spirit of Chengdu.

Site Analysis

The site used to be a forgotten lakefront space, but its surroundings featured superior clear water resources, ecological wetland conditions, and abundant native plant resources for the first survey. By investigating the living habits and leisure preferences of residents in surrounding cities, the overall design adhered to the principles of localization and micro-design, and preserved the material elements with original memories. The park set up waterfront activities with different themes and scales with moderate intervention, and regave the waterfront park a more vivid concept of sports and healthy life.

Design Challenge

Public green spaces are not separate, but a part of the urban city. Therefore, the designers firstly considered the people’s spatial experience, as well as the different activities they might participate in. How to balance the needs of operation and sales, such as adjusting the four-season flower landscape to long-term flower landscape, coordination of construction period, and how to avoid the idleness of equipment caused by over design, and control the cost to meet the long-term maintenance needs, must be included in the technical considerations of substantive implementation.

Design Strategy

  1. The urban public waterfront landscape should follow the land development strategy, with increasing the overall landscape premium as the core, and future operational planning as the design means. Based on the core urban traffic guidance, different functional zones and sports themes should be clearly defined;
  2. Reasonably plan landscape memory nodes and create differentiated landscape rhythms for each section; reasonably plan the functions and match the functional demands of surrounding plots;
  3. Respect the memory of the original local life, reasonably connect the spatial atmosphere of different sports themes, restore the site condition, combine the types of sports and the activity demands of the urbanites, create multi-dimensional life scenes, and make the site have a lively atmosphere and a sense of local life.

Design Innovation

In response to the new generation’s pursuit of good looking and strong interaction, the site also includes sports activity with youthful characteristics such as skateboarding, which not only enhances physical fitness but also provides social attributes.

The designers made appropriate use of the inner lake resources, diverted water into the canal, and created a rare landscape experience along the lake bay. They created a multi-dimensional spatial tour route based on the terrain and site functions, combining water and land, and integrating operation logic, so as to create a dynamic and livable image.

Ecological Restoration

Based on the principle of plant conservation, the designers took photos and used numbers to arrange trees according to their shapes and sizes, most of them preserved on site, and the locally reusable tree species were replaced in the site through the plant arrangement, which greatly reduced the construction cost of the project.

Diversified Spaces

The park presents a dynamic and diversified living atmosphere, providing a vibrant community for the surroundings. After the COVID-19 crisis, people change their outdoor living ways, they are eager to go to parks, hope to see the greenery whenever they open windows or go out. The park, as a new landmark, provides people with activity, sports, social communication and ecological science popularization spaces, satisfying different needs of the surrounding communities for outdoor natural experience.

The community-scale waterfront space can meet the needs of residents walking and visiting the park, and the waterfront area that injects various vitality into daily life can provide a place for communication.

Natural grass slopes achieves different effects. Perhaps it’s holding a concert, camping party, parent-child gathering on weekends in the spacious green space… The expected lifestyle can be appealed to the site as much as possible.

Project Location: Dayi County, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China

Design year: 2021

Year Built: 2021

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