Bingxue Park (Vanke Snow and Ice Park)
- Award Year: 2022
- Award Category: Design over $500k
- Award Designation: Merit Award
- Client: China Vanke Co., Ltd.
- Location: Inner Mongolia, P.R. China
Once a disorienting and inaccessible maze of deserted crumbling place where garbage piled up, Bingxue Park is now a unified, wholly accessible public park- a welcoming integrated place against desertification at Inner Mongolia, Baotou.
Before: A Disorienting Abandoned Shelterbelt land, before the completion of the park, the park was an uninviting and inaccessible deserted crumbling place where garbage was piled up and surrounded by gloomy malnourished trees.
Now: An Elegant Sustainable Park Invites Play. The new park provides an elegant sustainable soil remediation strategy, and create connections that transform abandoned shelterbelt lands into a living ecosystem and a new kind of urban ecological park, encourages use throughout the day with a variety of programming.
Desertification Mitigation Strategy: The landscape architect designed the site: 1- Reshape the rows of a shelterbelt, against wind erosion and improve water percolation. 2- Established a modular Greenland under the shelterbelt grid. 3- Convert the Modular Green to an integrated park, creating open space for recreation, improving site drainage and augmenting the overall ecological health of Inner Mongolia.
A Sustainable Modular Park: Bingxue park provides the opportunity for park users to engage actively within the open plaza to the south and enjoy quiet moments of solitude within the shaded seating areas nestled under the canopy of the grove (the woods) to the north.
An Oasis of Inner Mongolia: Greenway was established from a shelterbelt, lush plantings of native and adaptive species greet visitors at every edge of the park, providing seasonal interest year-round.
The Iceberg Art Installation: Dramatic lighting effects are cast against the huge 8m tall sculptures titled “Iceberg Showers”. It is a huge installation that resembles an iceberg, protruding from a folding mountain base, it's made up of thousands of small fiber tube triangles in shades of blue-green, Intertwined together with thousands of connectors.
The Fiber Tube Tunnel: The fiber tube tunnel features a textured weave that allows lights to enter while curving around the east entrance of the playground.
A Continuous Recreation Park: A series of interconnected places connected by arching circular parks – Iceberg Showers, Sports park, fun run skating, and Snow Ice Island – offer quiet spaces within the larger, more active park, contributing to a variety of experiences and biodiversity throughout. All places that cross the site will be modified to create one continuous park and an urban modular park under the desert shelterbelt.
The Combined Place: The park is a popular venue for youth and adult sports; it deftly balances scale and function, creating comfortable areas not just for large gatherings but also for individuals and small groups.
Where Fun, and Community Participation: The skating and running path promote effortless sports activities for the nearly 300 community residents that play within a ten-minute walk to enjoy the activities of the park.
Milky-Way Fountain: The Milky-way fountain has quickly become one of the most popular summertime hangouts and a common meeting ground for Inner Mongolians.
Sustainability of a Desert Greenway: The sustainability and resiliency strategies informed all design, investigations, and decisions. With the addition of nearly half an acre of green space and a third of an acre of permeable paving, Bingxue Park is now over 50% pervious, allowing for stormwater to be collected, filtered, and re-used via a cistern belowground.
Carving Details: Carving on the ground of the distribution of glaciers in the west square of the park.
A welcoming space for Young Explorers: A white sand beach, climbing poles, slides, and a climbing net all allow children to play in a snow- themed playground designed specifically for them and constructed with local organic materials.
Where a Flexible Park and Public Realm Intersect: A restoring the site to a sustainable shelterbelt greenway, desertification resisting greenbelt, a people’s park incorporated new communities, a café, a playground, a sports field, and a flexible space with a dynamic milky-way fountain into the park, with its level, infinitely flexible surface, improving circulations for all visitors to the park and the surrounding urban fabric.