The project is located in Wanggang Village, an old village of Guangzhou, China, with a renovation area of 6,000 square meters, 2,000 villagers, a migrant population of more than 100,000, and a floating population of more than 300,000. How to renovate the site with a controllable cost through sustainable landscape design, solve practical problems, improve the quality of urban public spaces, arouse and reconstruct the memory of the original culture of the site was the core of the design.
The design fully respected the layout of the existing old village and summarized existing resource elements. The original alleys were connected to form the main landscape line of the village. Some dilapidated houses were demolished and reconstructed into public spaces, such as “pocket parks”, which made residents here have the possibility of breathing freely in the originally crowded spaces.
The project applied four strategies of reconstructing space, traffic guidance, cultural inheritance, and site activation to sort out the cultural activity square in front of the ancestral hall, the pocket park under the banyan tree at the entrance of the village, and the small theater under the tree, providing enough spaces for cultural activities. The unique history and culture of the site were implicitly integrated into the landscape design.
The renovated Wangnan Park creates humane spaces for relaxation and communication, where people can watch movies in the open air, play games under trees, enjoy the coolness by the pool, and even hold creative market activities. It allows residents to enjoy their life that improved by the design, restores the vitality of the site, and upgrades environmental quality.
It has injected new daily life and vitality into the development of the old city, opened up a new path for the development of Guangzhou's urban planning, and played an important role in promoting the quality construction of the city and creating a beautiful living environment.
The scenic pavilion pergola was inspired by Chinese calligraphic strokes, while horizontal stroke, vertical stroke, left-falling stroke and right-falling stroke were used as design elements of the main structure. The unique Manchuria window of traditional Chinese architecture was used in the landscape design.
The planting design retained a large number of existing banyan trees to minimize damage to the environment. The old trees growing around the pond continued the memory of the site, and the mutual penetration of the site and nature effectively protected the natural ecology.
The site retained the original old stone pavement and reused it in the ancestral hall square. The design mainly used concrete materials, and the alternation of new and old materials highlighted the historical sense of the site. Moreover, the rainwater garden solved the problems of viewing, resting and rainwater recycling. It was like a living body that grew naturally in the site.