. . . . . TaiYuan Park . . . . .
The former Taiyuan guild hall, located in the xuanwu district in Beijing, is a rather large compound of interconnected courtyards that was transformed over the years by incoming inhabitants to the point of becoming a hectic urban maze of micro private spaces. BaO response to the competition that aimed at retransforming this whole area, sprung from the observation of two ubiquitous issues in Beijing hutongs: the lack of open and generous public spaces, and the lack of medium scale community amenities. The TaiYuan Park project thus tried to superpose on top of each other a collective equipment in the form of an underground community swimming pool and a public space in the form of an open-air park.
The park proposal is a celebration of the hutongs life and joie de vivre. The idea was to entirely liberate and open up the site while keeping the traces of the former buildings (legal and illegal properties) as a basis to reconstruct pavilions and landscaping. The whole park becomes a patchwork of different conditions and most of the former buildings become open halls where only the structure and the roofs are preserved. The experience become one walking under a sea of tree canopies and floating roofs, moving between open and closed spaces, hardness and softness, mineral and green, pavilions and amenities. Safeguarding the “trace of the plan” is here taken literally by means of maintaining rigorously all the former building implantations and signifying them by either changes in the ground conditions, specific markings, or preservation of the structural skelettons in the case of pavilions. Several small indoor buildings spread across the park house a series of community usages while the whole site is covered by a dense layer of trees that form a sort of explosive green lung in the middle of the grey city.
Hidden underneath, the swimming pool is in complete opposition with the world above. It's a large structure with a contemporary rational plan. After descending from the street, one reaches a small lobby overseeing the whole swimming hall, goes through the ritual of changing and showering, and chooses to either go to the bathhouse aisle or the larger swimming areas. All the spaces are lit from above through rather large skylights that are distributed all around the park and which shape, size and location depend on the traces of the former buildings that were chosen for this function. Though those openings, park goers enjoy a prime viewpoint on the ballet of swimmers underneath while those in the swimming hall haves glimpses of the urban life unfolding above.
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