Chongqing China Resources 24 City is built on the former site of Chongqing Construction Factory, and it is adjacent to Chongqing Egongyan bridge and only 200m away from the well-known Yangjiaping commercial street. Beside the Yangtze River and built on an exceptionally high-quality land, it will become a mega-community capable of holding 60,000 people after completion, and also an intersection of “crossing” transportation arteries in future Chongqing. Considering that the predecessor of the factory was one of the monuments left by “Hanyang Arsenal” in Chongqing and that Chongqing used to be the “Provisional Capital” of the Kuomingtang Government during the Republic of China era, the architect, in face of such a high-quality area superior in terms of natural, transportation and cultural environments, must be double cautious.
Before development, the factory encountered the situation encountered by most “industrial heritages” in China: In its early years, for the purpose of meeting workers’ basic needs, the self-contained factory gradually incorporated residential, educational, shopping and other supporting facilities, and created a self-sufficient production and living pattern. However, with the transformation of industrial structure and the development of social division of labour in domestic, the self-sufficient flourishing age has become a past tense for the factory, and now the first question to be answered by the design is how to revitalize this area and endow it with the residential charm of the new era.
The name of the project is inspired by 24 City, the film directed by Jia Zhangke, a new prominent director in China. This film records the transition of the factory during the age of industrial revolution, and depicts the complicated feelings that “Things past have become memories, just like the change of the seasons”, that “The era moving forward is both strange yet familiar”, and that “We respect the past construction and efforts, and we understand the urbanization process we are undergoing today”.
The fluctuations of topography constitute a basic characteristic of Chongqing and a basic fact in the gradually elevated base of China Resources 24 City; the rich variety of vegetation retained on site has accumulated rich landscape resources, and provided it with a charm worthy of detailed explorations. However, due to the unstructured planning and illegal buildings left by history, the entire area is distributed with complicated, mixed and disorderly flow lines. Meanwhile, the scattering of green spaces has cost these precious natural resources their intrinsic utilization values. These drawbacks combine to urge the architect to get rid of anything other than what are absolutely essential based on systematic contemporary architectural theories, and to inject vitality and vigour into this site. In this context, memories seem to be not that far away, and they penetrate into the details of our life in the forms with which we are familiar.
Adopting “retention”, “transplant”, “overlapping”, “reconstruction”, “deduction” and many other techniques in the design process, the architect has transformed original value resources into signs with rich historical values, and enriched the connotations of the community. What is especially worthy of mentioning is that, in the layout of the riverside area, the architect has utilized the natural elevation difference and transition of the project base to meet the architectural demands for landscape and comfort, planned a natural arc-shaped layout, created a ring in the building cluster, and enclosed the centre into a theme garden in the community. Such a layout has increased the riverside landscape view of the architecture, ensured a sufficient spacing between monomer buildings, provided 80% of the monomer residential house types with an overlooking platform, and thus realized the sharing of landscape. In terms of comfort design, the architect has also taken into account the local climatic conditions of Chongqing and the existing transportation conditions of the base, and consciously created ventilation corridors to introduce river breeze and enhance the ventilation effect of residences; meanwhile, the house types within the community are turned away from the highway nearby, thus to reduce noise interferences.
Before development, the factory encountered the situation encountered by most “industrial heritages” in China: In its early years, for the purpose of meeting workers’ basic needs, the self-contained factory gradually incorporated residential, educational, shopping and other supporting facilities, and created a self-sufficient production and living pattern. However, with the transformation of industrial structure and the development of social division of labour in domestic, the self-sufficient flourishing age has become a past tense for the factory, and now the first question to be answered by the design is how to revitalize this area and endow it with the residential charm of the new era.
The name of the project is inspired by 24 City, the film directed by Jia Zhangke, a new prominent director in China. This film records the transition of the factory during the age of industrial revolution, and depicts the complicated feelings that “Things past have become memories, just like the change of the seasons”, that “The era moving forward is both strange yet familiar”, and that “We respect the past construction and efforts, and we understand the urbanization process we are undergoing today”.
The fluctuations of topography constitute a basic characteristic of Chongqing and a basic fact in the gradually elevated base of China Resources 24 City; the rich variety of vegetation retained on site has accumulated rich landscape resources, and provided it with a charm worthy of detailed explorations. However, due to the unstructured planning and illegal buildings left by history, the entire area is distributed with complicated, mixed and disorderly flow lines. Meanwhile, the scattering of green spaces has cost these precious natural resources their intrinsic utilization values. These drawbacks combine to urge the architect to get rid of anything other than what are absolutely essential based on systematic contemporary architectural theories, and to inject vitality and vigour into this site. In this context, memories seem to be not that far away, and they penetrate into the details of our life in the forms with which we are familiar.
Adopting “retention”, “transplant”, “overlapping”, “reconstruction”, “deduction” and many other techniques in the design process, the architect has transformed original value resources into signs with rich historical values, and enriched the connotations of the community. What is especially worthy of mentioning is that, in the layout of the riverside area, the architect has utilized the natural elevation difference and transition of the project base to meet the architectural demands for landscape and comfort, planned a natural arc-shaped layout, created a ring in the building cluster, and enclosed the centre into a theme garden in the community. Such a layout has increased the riverside landscape view of the architecture, ensured a sufficient spacing between monomer buildings, provided 80% of the monomer residential house types with an overlooking platform, and thus realized the sharing of landscape. In terms of comfort design, the architect has also taken into account the local climatic conditions of Chongqing and the existing transportation conditions of the base, and consciously created ventilation corridors to introduce river breeze and enhance the ventilation effect of residences; meanwhile, the house types within the community are turned away from the highway nearby, thus to reduce noise interferences.
