StudioWoodroffePapa

Ascendas OneHub, Guangzhou Knowledge City, Guangzhou, PRC

Ascendas have been long term clients and collaborators of Studio Woodroffe Papa, working together to develop their next generation of business and science parks. These new initiatives in urban transformation are associated with the growing knowledge economy and propose more sustainable urban communities.

The goal is to establish urban and architectural guide-lines that can support cross-sector business synergies. This is achieved by organising multi-tenanted buildings, stand alone offices, amenities, F&B outlets and residential space into mixed-use ‘integrated communities’.

Re-zoning and phasing to achieve integrated community

Reject landscape as an expensive, unused buffer zone between buildings

Landscape becomes the means of achieving diverse movement

Amenities and landscape as typological drivers

In this project, the challenge has been to show how these types of environments can be ‘designed in’ to every phase of the masterplan, to achieve a sense of urbanity despite planning regulations that typically result in wide roads and isolated buildings devoid of street life.

The masterplan and urban guidelines concentrate on defining various forms of indoor and outdoor social spaces where one might cultivate social relationships and synergies. These spaces are linked to an over-arching landscape that becomes the means to achieve diverse movement, integration, identity and synergy.

Street vitality is focused on urban nodes around the MRT station, on the corners of the site where connectivity to the surroundings are encouraged, in neighborhoods where the buildings are lower and closer together, and where the porous and perforated urban fabric is ideal for cultivating local engagement and cross-sector business.

Node 1