by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design large, mixed-use developments that work as integrated urban elements amenable to human-scaled interaction in cities with rapidly increasing populations and haphazard urban planning practices?

Summary: Steven Holl’s three mixed-use projects in China (the Sliced Porosity Block, Linked Hybrid, and Vanke Center) question current trends in Chinese development by subverting monumental verticality with diverse arrangements of collaborative massing, horizontal circulation, and an approachable, urban porosity that welcomes visitors and users. Despite their size, these large projects focus on a much smaller scale, creating what Holl calls a micro urbanism.

How can an architect transcend the haphazard urban planning and development patterns of the city they’re designing for? If you’re Steven Holl, AIA, and you’re in charge of designing hundred of thousands of square feet in Chinese metropolises with exploding populations, you start by building your own cities with their own focus on the smallest of scales within them.

In the grips of the largest urban migration in human history, at least 200 million people are expected to flood into urban areas from the Chinese countryside in the next 20 years, according to the Asia Times. Left unprepared for this deluge of people, Chinese cities are hastily erecting “mega-block projects, which contain huge shopping malls with office and residential towers stacked above” and have “no public open space, no greenery, and no programmatic variety,” says Holl, reached via-email as he travels the West Coast lecture circuit. “Meanwhile, the introspective program turns a blank façade to the existing city. To the pedestrian walking by, these new monsters repel in their awkward scaleless imposition.”

A trio of projects in China all challenge this established development model with a mix of uses arranged within a collaboratively massed and human-scaled urban porosity and accessibility—what Holl calls a “micro-urbanism” all its own.

“Urban ambitions,” not prescriptive verticality
Holl’s three projects are easily defined in opposition to the contemporary tradition of large-scale development in urban China. As some of the world’s tallest buildings rise around them, these mixed-use projects question the assumed mode of monumental verticality and podium-to-high-rise development. They eschew purely vertical and singular designs for ones in which mixed uses are distributed across several separate and irregularly massed volumes that contain a wealth of horizontal circulation paths. Holl and his eponymous firm illustrated this succinctly with an early drawing for their Sliced Porosity Block project that shows two towers on top of a broad podium. An emphatic “X” is drawn through the sketch, and it’s labeled “monolithic inward focus.”

The Vanke Center in Shenzhen defies this cult of verticality most directly. It’s literally a horizontal skyscraper; a long rectilinear mass tipped on its side with arms and branches reaching out from its main stem.

“All of these projects share urban ambitions,” says Holl—“the ideals of pedestrian orientation, public open space formation, juxtaposition, [a] variety of urban programs, and super-green architecture.”

The three projects emphasize “green” with sustainability as well as open, public park space. The tower-surrounded park of Beijing’s Linked Hybrid and Chengdu’s Sliced Porosity Block both bear a superficial resemblance to Corbusier’s Modernist classic “Garden City” model, where messy cities thrown into shock by the Industrial Revolution would be reformed by stately, minimalist towers that surround a landscaped public square, all connected by roads for cars. But Holl says his designs in China show that contemporary, integrated urban success is based not on absolutist claims to function, precision, and perfection, but is instead aided by the acceptance of ambiguity—in his words, “crossbred schema and combined methods.”

And besides, he adds: “Personally, I feel closer to Jane Jacobs.”

Holl’s “crossbred schema” creates a porous urban environment that is accessible and inviting to pedestrians and visitors from every side. Mixed uses, asymmetrical masses, and diverse and plentiful circulation paths build micro-scale urbanisms within these much larger plans that draw people into these small-scale cities, in each case using their permeability to the outside metropolis to help activate their humanistic program.

The plans
The five towers that make up the Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu are perhaps the most apparent examples of how Holl has used volumetric richness to create a large-scale project that focuses on success at a smaller scale. Up from an elevated and landscaped public plaza that connects to surrounding sidewalks and roads, the towers (each one dedicated to a different program use) have various masses sliced off to maximize daylighting, creating a subtle, sculptural effect.

The project’s public space begins at the lower retail plaza level and extends upward via an enclosed escalator to the seventh and eight floors, where there is a series of three public pavilions and bridges connecting the towers. Not yet under construction, the project will contain offices, apartments, retail space, cafes, and restaurants, and its designers are hoping it will attain LEED® Gold certification.

The 722,000-square-foot Linked Hybrid project also links multiple mixed-use towers that are cooperative pieces of a larger whole. This time, eight towers are joined together by skywalks that form a loop of public and retail uses at the 20th floor, expressing a “collective aspiration,” according to a Steven Holl Architect’s press release.

More rectilinear and conservative in its massing than the Sliced Porosity Block, the Linked Hybrid does include multi-story cantilevers and angled, tapering skywalks that remind viewers of its unique volumetric language and its suspicion of de facto verticality. This mixture of vertical and horizontal forms is the hybrid synthesis that hints at the project’s name. It refers to fusing two Chinese building models together: the low horizontality of Chinese buildings from antiquity to the late 20th century, and the surge of vertical monuments that took place after China’s capitalist awakening.

Currently under construction, the Linked Hybrid will contain apartments, galleries, retail space, a hotel, and an underground parking garage. It’s also intended to be certified as LEED Gold. The project’s landscaped public plaza contains water features and expands across multiple levels.

Holl’s design for the 358,000-square-foot Vanke Center (named after China Vanke, the nation’s largest property developer) hovers over its respective outdoor public space. This horizontal skyscraper is elevated above a tropical garden on eight core legs. Instead of breaking up the building’s different uses into separate masses with a larger collective footprint, Holl elevated the entire design up to 115 feet, preserving as much of the park space below the building as possible, creating a shaded microclimate, and maximizing the coastal views of Dapeng Bay and the South China Sea.

The Vanke Center will feature sustainability systems like solar panels and geothermal cooling. It’s currently under construction and will contain a conference center, a hotel, offices, and apartments.

Macro and micro
With their emphasis on sustainability and attention to a personable, human scale, these projects could become the feel-good urbanism victories of the decade for China, a place where development can be brutish and confrontational. Holl’s greatest victory for these micro-urban places will be if their humanistic values are accepted and perpetuated into the riotously expanding macro-urban environments that surround them. As the city permeates the micro-urban, the micro-urban permeates the city.