Landscape Design for Fuzhou Strait Culture and Art Centre—A Beautiful "Jasmine Flower"

Inspired by Fuzhou's city flower, the jasmine, the landscape design for Fuzhou Strait Culture and Art Centre created a new public space and shared culture palace with romantic, artistic delight for more than 7 million citizens. The perfect combination of landscape design and architecture integrates the activities carried out in cultural architecture into landscape space, providing citizens natural, vibrant, and diverse experiences of the leisure and entertainment of the Fuzhou Strait Culture and Art Centre in various aspects.

The use of ecological technologies like green buildings and sponge cities facilitates rainwater utilization efficiency. It improves the living environment of urban residents, achieving the three-star green building standard in architecture, landscape, and construction organization.

The beautiful "Jasmine Flower" derived from both architecture and landscape makes the Fuzhou Strait Culture and Art Centre a new landmark to spread culture and artistic spirit to Fuzhou, China, and the world.

Project Narrative

The Strait Culture and Art Center locates in Liangcuo Village, Cangshan District, east of Nantai Island, Sanjiangkou, Fuzhou City. The total project area is 14.87 hectares, and the landscape area is 9.69 hectares. The superior geographical environment of Liangcuo Village and splendid culture with many historical figures form a strong cultural atmosphere generation by generation. 

Before the development of the project base, most of the areas are tidal flats, pits, and wasteland. Seven million ordinary citizens urgently need a center for cultural and artistic activities. Our challenge is that the construction of the project will inevitably affect the original site ecosystem. For addressing the ecological issues, we maintained the context of the village and created a waterfront leisure space. We integrated new functions, architectural icons, and structural dimensions under the original urban area, dealing with a relationship between the Min River, Liangcuo River, and the site. We created a cultural and artistic highland with Fuzhou characteristics, maximizing the value of serving the citizens, and minimizing human interference to nature.

The design uses a romantic, artistic landscape image to comprehensively cope with the various needs from sites to form an urban landscape with regional characteristics. It makes the Strait Culture and Art Center a new landmark to promote cultural and artistic spirit to Fuzhou, China, and even the world.

I. A Romantic Spirit Like Jasmine Flower

As early as 2000 years ago, jasmine flowers came to Fuzhou via the maritime silk road, playing significant symbolic meaning in Fuzhou. Jasmine tea scented by Fuzhou people became a specialty. Jasmine flowers have a profound influence on Fuzhou's culture, industry, and ecology, and are selected into the world's foremost agricultural, cultural heritage.

As to landscape design, the spatial order of the site landscape is established based on the image of jasmine petals. The five functional halls are connected through an extensive roof terrace to the landscape petals set up by the river bank, which comprehensively solves various demands to be met by the site and integrates with the main building, to create an artistic and romantic city image.

II. Extraordinary Experience In A Jasmine-Flower-Building For The Public 

1. Perfect integration of landscape and architecture

The building complex is divided into five smaller units along the curvature of the main facade, making it easy for users to move indoors and outdoors. "Each building has a core area. A semi-public arc corridor is used to integrate the public indoor space with the jasmine garden landscape around the building and to combine it with the front Mahangzhou Island Nature Reserve, making users more easily to travel indoors and outdoors.

2. The exhibition, communication and leisure space for citizens

Jasmine Square and the jasmine "petal" shaped deck along the river are public multifunctional gathering places. The bar petals, viewing petals, and dancer petals become citizens' fairs, providing convenience for citizens to set up bazaars and celebrate music festivals and various artistic performances. Hundreds of cultural activities have been held since its opening up. The green petals on the north are designed as a sunken garden with a mountain view, can be used as a picnic place.

3. The integration and interaction of waterscape

Since Fuzhou has more hot days, the water theme is especially attractive. Three sets of waterscape with different experiences are set up in the square. The circular fountain area holds a spray fountain that children can touch and play, giving people a feeling of coolness in hot summer. There are two circular openings in the square: terraces and bamboo bushes where the sitting people could see the Liangcuo River at the foot, and a 12-meter-high music fountain that will occasionally perform with the rainwater collected at a particular time of the day.

4. The all-round convenient traffic system

On the underground floor of the Fuzhou Strait Culture and Art Centre, the riverside promenade stretching along the Liangcuo River integrates the landscape and indoor space. It connects the subway station with the pedestrian walkway to form an international riverside leisure center. A large spiral pedestrian ramp is constructed to connect the building, the Jasmine Square, and Liangcuo River, providing convenient access to the main functional zones of the Centre.

Road systems in the park and the city greenway, riverside landscape belt, and Jasmine Square are connected in an organic way to attract joggers, bicycle riders, and families with children.

We hope to create a series of interrelated cultural experience spaces to bring deep regional cultural display and more high-quality artistic experience. Landscape design renders a large-scale gathering and cultural venue, as well as small-sized activities with lunches provided, catering to the needs of different user groups.

III. Development Without Adverse Impacts

The undeveloped site was mostly farmland, aquaculture pools, depressions with the automatic function for rain and flood. However, the construction of large-scale public service facilities has broken the original ecological environment of the site.

To address these issues, we considered the meteorological characteristics of frequent torrential rain in rainy seasons and typhoon seasons and the underlying surface conditions in the area. We selected different types of facilities like the rain garden, grass-planted ditch, sunken green land, underground rain pool for the storage, purification, reduction, and utilization of rainwater, ensuring the accumulative time of rainwater runoff in the facilities is less than 24 hours. After treatment, it successfully served for road spraying, green land irrigation, and water supplement for waterscape. The following effects have been achieved: rainfall of less than 21.3mm (24h) has been effectively controlled; the drainage pressure of the pumping station at the end of the downstream pipe network has been greatly reduced; the total annual runoff control rate is estimated to be 72%, and the effective reduction rate of rainwater runoff pollutants (in SS terms) can reach 54%, reducing the contribution of downstream rivers to pollution input. The accumulated time of rainwater runoff less than 21.3mm in the facility within 24h.

After treatment, it is entirely accessible for road spraying, green space irrigation, and waterscape replenishment, making a popular science education for citizen children.

IV. Potential Challenges

Before the project was developed, there were many pits and ponds, and a large amount of sea sand was used for backfilling. Subsidence problems and structural support are the most difficulties in landscape engineering technology.

Specifically, for the structure challenge in the Jasmine Square, which is designed to cover the water conservancy facilities under the terrace,  we make the square supported by a frame structure consisting of 155 pieces of 0.8m-1.2m thick columns to meet the load demand of large vehicles for water conservancy maintenance in the future, to ensure that the water conservancy facilities not to be damaged and could provide sufficient operating space at the same time.

For the subsidence problem, in the design of ordinary roads, connecting members are added at the joints of structural foundations of different forms like building entrances and exits, and platforms have been formed to ensure the settlement of ordinary roads and foundations of various styles. Besides, slopes have been applied in the joint positions to provide barrier-free access for pedestrians.

Summary and Significance

The project uses romantic design methods to form the symbolic "Jasmine" image, which has a profound influence on local culture and urban life and the perfect integration of the environment. Jasmine's "petal" space unit serves as a select carrier that interacts with the diverse and complex river ecological functions of the landscape, the cultural needs of citizens, outdoor features required by the building complex, and water resources engineering facilities.  Here even the recycling of rainwater functional requirements is merged into an artistic landscape image, promenading a moving scene along the Min River with "Jasmine Blossom".