The upcoming World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, inspired me to integrate the World Expo facilities with high density housing, to make optimal use of the investments being made in that content.
For my design approach, I focused on two important ideas I wanted to incorporate, first a homogeneous and non-hierarchical World Expo park design with its strolling water canals and its pavilions and secondly a well interlaced urban fabric which ties the future urban facilities with the high density residential towers.
Through the use of Rhino scripts and the application of defined parameters, I generated an urban pattern for the 8 square kilometer site on both shores of the Huangpu River.
The circle packing script led to a homogenous distribution of placeholders for each square footage of a World Expo Pavilion and a housing tower.
The Voronoi and Delaunay-Triangulation pattern created island cells with each a pavilion as its centre and a non-hierarchical circulation network connecting each pavilion and so each island with each other. In a larger context, this urban fabric stitches the two shores of the Huangpu River, Puxi and Pudong closer together, offering new bridges to the city of Shanghai.
Randomly, the pavilion placements create a polycentric urban geometry all over the site. At this centres, it should be presumed that urban dynamics are condensed and therefore, formally, the pavilions melt together and are lifted up the ground floor, creating a upper level for the city itself. Car traffic and park strollers are separated in height.
After the World Expo in 2010, I propose that residential towers arise to accommodate nearly one million habitants. The mega block structures, in spite of its height - the tallest is planned to be 300 metres, is designed after the Chinese typology of the superblock - which defines the new Chinese City in the same way that the grid defines New York.
Evolving the concept of collective culture, see superblock and integrating it into a highly connected setting, I hope to avoid the cul-de-sac formations witnessed in the present compartmentalizing of the residential sphere and to overcome the fortifying situation of a courtyard building by interlinking it to the designed urban fabric and pavilions which would function as urban facilities as schools, cultural meeting points or simply as shopping venues.
At the end, while preserving the traditional Chinese typology of the Super-Block, my multi-decade project offers not only the everlasting symbol of the World Expo 2010, more importantly it will meet the rapidly expansion requirements of Shanghai.
