We are living in an era of a looming environmental crisis. After 3 decades of unprecedented urban growth in China, we are seeing remarkable prosperity on the surface while facing the worst environmental problems ever seen in history.
OPEN began its practice at this very moment. We see it our mission and responsibility to find the ultimate balance between nature and people. We take this special opportunity at the STREET exhibition in 2011 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture to showcase our hidden yet consistent agenda in a series of our recent architectural and urban projects – “building nature or anti-building in the process of building”.
In Chinese, the word “park” is made up of two characters, the first means “public” and the second means “garden”. This series of our work all evolved around these two common threads, “Public” and “Garden”. More specifically, the relationship among people, and the relationship between people and nature. In each of the 7 projects exhibited here, we have injected shared public spaces that facilitate social exchange and bind the other programs together. We have also created gardens throughout the built spaces, not as decoration, but as integral parts of the architecture, that reconnects people back to the fundamentals of life, NATURE. “Public” and “Garden” are intertwined and inseparable in our projects. We are interested in public space that is filled with nature, and nature that is enjoyed by everyone!
In our space on the STREET at 2011 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, nature dominates and façade disappears. In an era of architecture dominated by fashion, shapes and images, our answer to the given proposition – the making of a façade on the STREET – is actually “Façadeless”. Nature is the space and the façade. The 3 surrounding walls are skinned with polished stainless steel sheets that dematerialize and dissolve the space by reflecting the nature indefinitely. On the surface of these walls 7 selected projects are each showcased by a multimedia presentation and a conceptual model, which has a similar finish as the wall.
