Next C Water City is a new, fully self-contained sustainable city planned for 500,000 residents. Water was central to the Next C planning concept, supplied by two adjacent rivers and monsoon rains. The city is a system of wetlands, rivers, lakes, and canals, cleansing the water from up-river communities and managing floods during the monsoon season. Working with SOM’s urban design team, Thomas Balsley Associates strategized an open space plan that consisted of seven primary landscape typologies: Central Parks, Civic Squares, Urban Promenades, Water Edge Parks, Canal Parks, Neighborhood Parks, and Wetland Parks filtering and polishing poor quality water from the Chaobai River prior to discharging into the new city’s extensive waterways and eventually into the Yongding River. Each open space typology collectively provides green links throughout the city, and open space programming relates directly to adjacent land uses. Parks along waterways were designed with each season’s environmental extremes in mind, from dry to flooded, creating unique parks for every season.
Fuzhou Vanke City
The Yongtai project, located inside the Red Cliff Scenic Area, borders the Dazhang River and consists of a 45-hectare watershed area surrounded by 12 small hills. It features a boutique hotel, a shopping street, clubhouses, residential high-rises, townhouses, and detached homes. The overall project plan calls for housing clusters that follow the natural site t...
Kingold Century Centre
This new mixed-use development features a complex program that includes a hotel, rental space for other companies, eateries, service apartments, and retail facilities. SWA’s design challenge was to create a common space that can be enjoyed by the disparate users on-site at any given time. A common plaza includes multiple restaurants on a terraced platform that...
Stanford West Apartments
SWA placed a special emphasis on maintaining the riparian corridor with native planting, using consideration when dealing with the archaeologically sensitive areas of the site, as well as existing recreation trails and landscape amenities such as parks and play areas. The internal street grid and architectural and landscape elements are designed to recall the ...
SunCity Tachikawa Showa Kinen Koen
SunCity Showa Kinen Koen takes its name from the beloved Koen National Park that borders the development to the east and south. Built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Emperor Showa’s reign, the park offers an ideal setting for Half Century More’s flagship continuum-of-care retirement community, with 518 independent living units and 82 nursing...