Tall & Urban News

URBANUS has recently released new imagery of its Yuehai Community Sport and Cultural Center, designed in response to an evolving attitude towards urban development in Shenzhen. After undergoing a rapid and extensive period of urbanization, the Chinese city is currently entering a refined era of urbanization. The existing architectural and urban developments throughout the city, including cultural and recreational facilities, are characterized as isolated islands, with a lack of variance and contact with each other. This organization fails to meet the needs of the contemporary citizen. A diverse network of embedded cultural nodes is fast becoming the new direction for the city’s development—resulting in a new urban public building typology that departs from the traditional social and architectural norms of the city.

The Shenzhen/Beijing-based architecture studio URBANUS follows this new method for urban organization with the Yuehai Community Culture and Sports Center.

The functions of sport and cultural centers have traditionally been separated, resulting in a building that is programmatically secluded and wholly functional, rather than interactive. Fragmented public space surrounding these structures thus offers the opportunity for interaction between different groups of people, and has become a source of true vitality for these sites. In the design of the new Yuehai Community Sport and Cultural Center, URBANUS ensures both the independent operation of all indoor facilities, while providing as much public open space as possible to promote interaction. The design team integrates the public plaza throughout the project in three dimensions, eliminating the common conception that the open public space within a city is only limited to the ground plane.

URBANUS elevates these public spaces and superimposes a vertical organization, generating a series of interconnected aerial public platforms situated at varying heights throughout the building. The permeating plazas encourage interaction between those within the building and the rest of the city, creating a new building type of three-dimensional public space, for use by everyone in the city of Shenzhen.

For more on this story, go to designboom.