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Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. Flowing Gardens in Xi’an, China by Plasma StudioJune 21st, 2011 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: Plasma Studio The International Horticultural Expo becomes instigator and core for the redevelopment of a large area between the airport and the ancient city center of Xi’an, known as the home of the Terracotta Army and business centre of the vast Chinese interior. Plasma Studio with collaborators GroundLab and LAUR Studio won this invited international competition with a radical self-sustainable vision for the future: Flowing Gardens creates a consonant functionality of water, planting, circulation and architecture into one seamless system.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio
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 Image Courtesy Plasma Studio The proposal comprises of a 5000 sqm Creativity Centre, a 4000 sqm Greenhouse and the 3500 sqm Guangyun Entrance bridge sitting in a 37 ha landscape that will house the International Horticultural Expo and a park for Xi’an City as legacy. The Expo opened on the 28th of April 2011, and will receive an estimated 12 Mio visitors over the following 6 months.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio Flowing Gardens unfolds many sinuous paths, creating a network of intermingling circulation, landscape and water. The given topography and its existing slopes were used to draw out the paths in a way similar to how roads ribbon around a mountain, negotiating steepness with gradients. These paths vary in width ranging from main walkways and arteries to towpaths. The patches between these paths become the zones for various planting types and wetland areas, which retain a quality of ease of maintenance.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio Plasma projected three buildings, located at the intersections of the major pathways are developed as the nodal articulation and intensification of the landscape.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio Landscape The project proposes a hybrid of both natural and artificial systems, brought together as a synergy of waterscapes. With consideration to the amount of water required for irrigation, the project seeks to introduce various technologies and designs found in nature, but it is enhanced to meet the specific needs of the new population. Rainwater is collected and channeled into the wetland areas, where natural plants and reed beds clean and store the water, which is then later dispersed and used for irrigation. These integrated wetlands and ponds are also to be enjoyed by the visitors as oasis and points of personal tranquility. More complex water cycle issues are sensitively controlled with the introduction of grey and black water treatment systems.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio The proposal aims to make use of the initial investment and organisation during the exhibition, to set up an environment, which becomes autonomous in function and character. The gardens transform the artificial and natural conditions of the site into a sustainable system that becomes increasingly more maintenance-free once the exhibition is over, allowing the park to develop into a new model, or paradigm, within the horticultural industry. The park area manifests in a variety of scales in association with very specific planting, surfacing and lighting, thus providing a sandbox of experiences that ranges from the very intimate with semi-enclosed, shaded, self contained, one- to-one spaces, to the very public with communal plazas formed by wider pedestrian paths with full exposure to the sun and a direct, uninterrupted visual link to the main hiatus on the site.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio The Guangyun Entrance operates on the level of infrastructure and fulfils the role of bridging over the main road that dissects the site. Thus it channels the visitors from the entry plaza, where they congregate and orient themselves after having entered into the Expo and sets them into a definite direction. By bringing them up to +7.00 m the bridge offers vantage points from where to gain an overview of the different zones of the Expo ahead.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma Functionally, the bridge needs to have two lanes for incoming and outgoing traffic. Naturally, these flows are very uneven and change greatly between the beginning and end of the day. Taking the idea from the London Underground escalators we devised the bridge to have three lanes, where the middle lane switches from the incoming direction in the morning to outgoing later in the day.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma The three bands read as interwoven braids, and together with a trellis roof structure give the appearance of bands of landscape peeling off and turning into structure. Between the three bands are green areas and a water feature for visitors to stop, have a rest and enjoy the view. Above them an open trellis steel structure forms a shading device that becomes overgrown with climbing plants forming a green roof, and suggesting to distant onlookers the theme of the Expo.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma For this lightweight roof, we developed together with Arup an innovative tensegrity structure that appears as beams seemingly free-floating in space.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma The Creativity Pavilion is located on the edge of the lake as the endpoint to the central axis that starts with the Gate Building, and is the starting point for the water crossing by boat. It ties in with a series of piers that follow the landscape jutting out into the water. The built volume is interwoven with the articulating ground, producing continuities on many levels integrating the landscape and building together.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma From this flows the organization of the building massed as three parallel volumes within the landscape, flowing through and underneath, leading to the piers, the volumes themselves hover as cantilevers over the lake. The fluid experience of passing through the landscape continues inside, where all zones are generous and interconnected.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma Inside, the use of ramps enables visitors to move up to the mezzanine level and out onto the roof of the building. Through its materiality the building again manifests itself as an extension of the ground with its floors and interior walls made from concrete and bronze is used as expression of local identity.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma The Greenhouse is formed as a precious crystal, semi-submerged in splendid isolation reached by boat across the lake followed by a short walk from the shore. The greenhouse blends into the hillside even more so than the other two structures. The building is entered through a prolonged cut, literally scooped up from the ground, emerging within a light-filled cavernous reception space.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma From here the visitor passes along a tessellated mesh of paths through three different climatic zones with corresponding plant environments. The greenhouse has a horseshoe plan creating a loop that changes radically in section to accommodate a sequence of different planting and spatial conditions. With the ground inside and out, gradually changing in relation to each other, the visitor experiences sequences of visual enclosure alternating with long vistas out and across. The horseshoe shape also generates an inner courtyard of outside space, making it the natural centre of the building and creating a three-dimensional interweaving of interior and exterior circulation.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma PLASMA STUDIO- Profile The term Plasma comes from Classic Greek and means modeling, form, fabric, imagination, fiction. In Physics the Plasma State- or fourth state of matter- describes a unique condition of matter arising at a complex overlay of external forces. Plasma, a charged field of particles, conducts energy.  Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma Folding space into space, Plasma draw landscapes into buildings, streets into facades, inside to outside. Transformative tectonics set spaces, planes and bodies into unforeseen relationships that challenge conventional topographies and spatial codes. While the angular and complex qualities of their forms might superficially affiliate them with ‘computer-generated’ architecture, decision- making is never relinquished to the computer. Strategic reasoning and the desire to produce specificity in place of generics drive tectonic form.  Architect Plasma are unconcerned with the creation of a visual ‘style’, transcending architectural photogenics and, informed by a rich dialogue with philosophical and social theory, they pursue the social in its quotidian and experiential aspects. They venture that the construction of topographic dialogues ‘may enable and potentialize new and different forms of social interaction’.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio These topographic dialogues are enacted by an architecture of trajectory and momentum, which responds to the nature of the topographies and the possibilities of engagement. Plasma is widely recognized as one of the leading emergent architecture and design practices with worldwide scope and outlook. The studio is working on all scales from furniture and installations to urbanism and master planning.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio Current projects include the complete masterplanning, landscape and building design of the 2011 International Horticultural Expo, China, a series of office blocks for Ordos, China, a new innovative street lighting system for EWO and several new-built residential and hospitality projects with a fresh take on Alpine vernacular through new innovative construction techniques and spatial modulation.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio Through combining academic research– at the Architectural Association and other leading institutions- with cutting-edge practice Plasma is developing advanced digital tools and methodologies to analyse complex challenges and respond by synthesizing spatial effects, functions, ergonomics. Image Courtesy Cristobal Palma This approach brought the practice many distinctions such as Zhulong’s ‘This Decade of Architecture in China’, the 2011 Wallpaper Design Award, 2008 ContractWorld Award, 2008 Next Generation Award, 2004 Design Vanguard, 2002 BD/Corus ‘Young Architect of the Year Award’, and the 2002 UK Galvanizing Award.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio Plasma’s work has been published widely- from leading design magazines to broadsheets and included in some of the most important compendiums on recent architecture- and exhibited internationally in recent solo shows at the DAZ- German Architecture Centre Berlin 2010 and Galeria Come Se, Rome 2009.  Image Courtesy Plasma Studio
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