Articles by Collin Chen

Overall Concept and Goal. Once carrying the branch line of Zhenru freight rail and later Caoyang Farmers’ Market, the near to 1-kilometer-long and 10- to 15-meter-wide site has been re-programmed as a fresh, multilevel, and mixed-use park, walkable and community-centered, shortly after the market’s closure in 2019. Conceived as ‘3K Corridors’, Caoyang Centennial Park brings art to community life, echoing the theme of 2021 Shanghai SUSAS. Site contexts were discovered and scenes reimagined, so as to design a vine-and-melon-like walking belt, from north to south, to reshape the streets’ grassland system, giving a further step of organic renewal of Caoyang Community. The special linear site, having served as a railway land and then a market for over 20 years, is a typical left-over space in megacities. We realize at first sight that even in a familiar city are there unexpected and surprising offcut spaces, and we must consider how to recycle them in the time of urban redevelopment.

Early last year, a “Trump Buddha” statue merging the image of Donald Trump with Chinese Zen became a social media hit. The humorous and surreal statue is designed by Wanmu Shazi, a creator with diverse roles.

Site and Background: Somewhere in the Tengger Desert. The project is located in the Shapotou Touristic District in Zhongwei City, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (NHAR), China, which is a sand sea about 2km away from the desert reserve. In recent years, desert tourism in Zhongwei is in the ascendant, and the Desert Galaxy Camp is a newly developed camp. As the main building of the site, the project not only provides supporting services for the camp, such as catering and comprehensive reception, but also serves as the symbol of the whole camp.

With the curatorial theme of “Searching the Glow of Future”, Glow Shenzhen 2021 seeks to integrate light art into urban life and release the vitality of urban public space. Daxing Jizi is invited to exhibit their architectural installation, “Dream Glow Pavilion”, at the Shenzhen Universiade Center, Glow Shenzhen’s Longgang section. The Universiade Center is about 990 meters wide from east to west and 1050 meters long from north to south, covering an area of 520,000 sqm, serving as a major place for fitness and leisure for the surrounding residents. During our research, we found that there are few small-scale structures for the public to relax, so how incorporating a small enjoyable space into the massive center became our initial intention of the design.

The Starry Sky Mirror Park in Lin-gang Special Area of Shanghai is embedded with two themes: sponge city ecological technology and astronomical observation. This project is located in Section B, the northern bank of the only wetland in the park. It includes a stage, a tower, and a bridge. The stage is named “Tong Guan” in Chinese, inviting people to gaze at the stars, watch the birds, and enjoy the view of the wetland together with their loved ones all at this very veranda; the only high point in the park is the observatory tower, whose Chinese name “Xuan Xing” depicts the motion of the stars; “Yu Xuan” is the name of the bridge, suggesting the form of the bridge is light as bird-feather.