Fuzhou Youth Plaza Urban Renewal | Shanghai AMJ architecture and urban planning Co., Ltd

The Youth Plaza is located on the bank of MinRiver, across the river from the Yantai Mountain Historic Scenic Area, and to the north from the Shangxiang Hang Historic Scenic Area and the Cangxia Scenic Area.This is an unique location in the “Heart of Min River” with a 360-degree view of the entire surrounding area, as it offers a panoramic view of the entire Min River.

Eduwik Architecture Excellence Awards 2022
First Award | Urban Design (Built)

Project Name: Fuzhou Youth Plaza Urban Renewal
Project Category: urban design

Studio Name: Shanghai AMJ architecture and urban planning Co., Ltd
Design Team: Lead Design：Minghua Xue，Lin Wang

Group Members: Xutan Wang, Congxiong Yang, Shengli Lu, Hewei Shen, Yi Qi, Xueqian Ding, Yifan Yao, Na Zhou
Area: 16,000 sqm
Year:2022
Location: Fuzhou, Fujian, China
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Before the renovation, the parking lot on the west side of the YMCA building occupied a large amount of the waterfront area, resulting in an obvious fault line between the historical scenic area and the waterfront space. The plaza in front of the YMCA building is cluttered with space. The plaza façade obscures the historic building. These problems lead to the lack of vitality of the original space, poor pedestrian experience and incomplete presentation of the historical landscape. In this design, we pay attention to the protection and preservation of the historical style, integrate the historical style of the YMCA building with the surrounding landscape, integrate the architecture and the landscape design. We design a continuous and complete viewing platform to make it an urban visual experience viewing center.

We link the Jiefang Bridge, the YMCA building, the parking lot and Cangxia Park, and build a new pedestrian bridge at the entrance of Cangxia Park to connect the historic district with the waterfront space, thus truly activating the linked Minjiang waterfront space.In front of the YMCA building, we use barrier-free ramps and grass slopes to solve the height difference in the site. The plaza was designed to set back the historic buildings as much as possible in order to fully reveal the historic architecture. A landscape platform is also set up to meet the needs of the public to enjoy the historical buildings and the scenery of Min River. In addition, a citizens’ station is built inside the landscape platform, and the design of the station refers to the style of the YMCA building, and the outer wall of the building is made of red bricks and stones. The red brick blends with the green grass slope, creating a warm and heavy appearance, a mellow and elegant temperament, and more importantly, it also inherits and continues the strong humanistic atmosphere of the YMCA building itself.

The most innovative design in this planning is to use the space of the waterfront embankment and combine the space topography and landscape environment to design an intelligent green slope parking lot.We address the parking needs of the area, while hiding its functions deep in the waterfront landscape. The parking lot is set up without affecting the overall landscape effect, but also creates a spatial feature of a large grass slope. The unique design of the large grass slope integrates the parking space requirements and also restores the natural ecological grass slope features, strengthening the restoration of the natural environment.At the same time, advanced AGV intelligent parking technology is introduced in the parking lot under the green slope.