Shanghai Yanlord Jing'an Century - Urban Riverside Forest

The site of Yanlord Jing‘an Century is situated in one of Shanghai's core central districts, Jing’an, and will be developed into residential apartments surrounded by cultural institutions, offices, and commercial developments. The landscape area is a 30x20m rectangular space. Being the only connection between the pedestrian and the sales gallery requires its design to catalyze a fresh im-pression and to convey the brand identity of "Returning to The Essentials". The main circulation, however, seems to be a straight line between sidewalk and the building en-trance, not to mention that there is no natural scenery around. To transform such small yet fully exposed space, landscape design draws inspiration from classical Chinese garden to create lay-ered plantings and reflective water feature, which both make the space seems greener and larger. Visitors can feel peace and pleasure once arrived at the "urban riverside forest", which tailored the natural elements to modern urban living. Visitors are guided to walk through the forest won-derland before entering the sales gallery. The site constrains and the need to leverage the inspiration led to 4 stages of a visiting experi-ence. The Arrival, The Journey of NIWA, Landscape of Senses and Enclose one’s self. Much attention was initially given to fostering a strong connection between the building and its landscape, optimizing the layers of curved planters, and composing forced perspectives. It was critical to get this relationship right to accentuate the horizontality of the view, courtyard, and architecture. For planting, we strive to design an integrated forest experience full of freedom and vitality. The designer carefully selects the trees based on seedling height, crown width, branch points, and overlap rate. The spatial composition allows people's eyes to navigate through the foreground, middle ground, and background. We hope that the trees will continue to grow into forest creat-ing amazing dancing shadow patterns in the future.