Tianyi Lake Children Dream Town

The Dream Town is an edutainment centre which offers children interactive learning and entertainment experience through role-play in different professions in a mini-city environment. The project is located near the famous mountain Tai, the cradle of the Confucianism in China. Its GFA is 9000m2, including 6500m2 for the edutainment venues and 1500m2 for the retails. This building is expected to attract the children in the surrounding counties with a total population of 5.5 million. It only took one year from the design to the completion.  How to achieve the coherence between an iconic structure and the site context? How to design a building that accommodates a “city” inside? To respond, we grew our design out of the site topography, i.e. to press the neutral mass into a series of splines by tracing the two small hills and the lakeshore curve. Meanwhile, we employed the urban pattern of stereotypical water-front cities, including streets, junctions, plazas, allies and building clusters, and organise them along the multiple curvy volumes according to programmatic play-rules. As a result, a singular building mass was choreographed into a collection of bended slab buildings which allow daylight penetrating into the deep space.