The customer for this project is Vanke, a leading construction company in China, which has initiated and supported an ambitious project in the southwest of Beijing called the Green Innovation Park. The construction of a green village on an area of 120 thousand square meters will become a kind of "visual aid" for Chinese developers and will allow them to practice energy saving technologies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The headquarters of the new park should be the Visitor Center, where it is planned to hold exhibitions and master classes dedicated to all kinds of green innovations, as well as provide everyone with information about the project. It was this object that Vanke ordered the well-known Danish bureau JDS Architects.
The site allocated for the construction of the visitor center is predictably located at the very beginning of the future park, in fact, immediately after the entrance zone. It is a rectangle sandwiched between two paths that embrace the park on both sides. A simple parallelepiped could be built in this place - it would contain all the necessary functions and serve as an excellent screen separating the park from the city. However, such a shape of the building would least of all correspond to the concept and ideology of a green village, so the architects made every effort to rethink it in the mainstream of eco-innovation.
The architects cut the rectangular "box" diagonally in such a way that the roof looks like a hill with two gentle slopes, which are oriented towards footpaths. Naturally, these slopes will be accessible to visitors - it will be possible to climb onto the roof at least to inspect the imposing territory of the park and orientate in it. In addition, such an unusual shape of the roof will allow collecting rainwater as efficiently as possible and using it for the needs of the complex.
It is interesting that it is precisely those ends of the roof that are most intensely blown by the fresh wind in the summer, which are “pulled” to the ground, while the cold winter winds, on the contrary, are opposed by high “hills”. In one of them, the architects are also placing solar panels, which will provide the building with the necessary amount of electricity, and the second is extended so that a long visor appears over the glazed facade of the complex - it will provide visitors with much-needed shade in summer. The facades are also equipped with blinds, in the lamellas of which solar panels are installed, which in hot weather "take over" the excess of sunlight.
A. M.
