SUN + GATE
First Prize Winner ! Making urbanity through Passages in the reappropriated Shanghai Expo Site
What types of passages to design in the eastern part of the Expo 2010 site? How to generate a real, lively urban neighborhood, facilitate mobilities, from metropolitan scale to green transport? How to connect the site to its natural and built environment using passages?
The challenge: to identify strategic points in a developing area under construction and proposing passages of different types for construction.
We didn't find a chinese word for «passage», but we found an interesting translation for in between space: the chinese characters of a sun inside a gate.
Our project is oriented on two main actions to create passages on the former 2010 expo site: re-gating (shifting limits to reconsider public space) and re-routing (adapting mobilities as magnets activating their in-between public space).
The passage to the river is a vibrant longitudinal public space crossing mono-functional enclaves. It’s activated by architectural magnets able to start changes on limits, rhythms and users using those places.
Little by little the gated community become the support of micro economy reinterpreting the historical figure of the lane, the business district is animated even out of the office schedule, and the river banks are not only a leisure place of destination but also a new entrance for the site with the reopening of the ferry terminal.
Furthermore, another actor able to reinforce this transversal strategy, the tramway, rerouted along the leisure park, shifts the gravity center of the expo site, creating a new sun between the gates.
"IVM International Program Passages":http://passages-ivm.com/en/demonstration/shanghai-making-urbanity-through-passages-reappropiated-expo-site
