Gateway Park forges dynamic interactions between environments and the populations that inhabit them. Park facilities allow residents to become aware of life-sustaining resources and, furthermore, to enjoy their value within an everyday lifestyle.
Architecture, Construction & Design Awards 2018
First Award | Category: Landscape Design (Built)
Architect: mosbach paysagistes
Team Members: Catherine Mosbach Landscape Architect Representative- Philippe Rahm Architect- Ricky Liu & Associates Architecture + Planners
Country: France
The park transforms all – water, wind, humans, and non-humans – who cross its vast, folded ground stretching from south to north. This topographic range allows residents to gain height and distance from their daily rhythms while being immersed in a living environment that is in constant formation. The ground introduces anfractuosities that protect passers-by from urban traffic while ensuring the continuity of ecological migration corridors, running 4km south to north, of animal, plant and human populations.
Beyond providing for the comfort of modern life, the creation of these ground foldings are also a technical tool parameterized according to porosity gradients. The permeability of a support determines its ability to capture water and thereby initiate living media. A little hole in the soil retains water, which in contact with oxygen germinates a seed, and little by little, a plant becomes landscape.
The stratigraphy of groundwater is correlated to the layered capacities of plant formations, together providing long-term indices of stormwater runoff and air quality. This data is articulated at comfort stations. These are distributed throughout the park and display environmental parameters relevant to the activities associated with the area. Vegetative gradients ‘punctuating’ the park uses the diversity of Taiwanese biomes to emphasize areas from the least hot, to the least polluted, to the least wet. Each series of vegetation and each of the installations distinguishes a garden within the park. In addition to introducing a vast ‘green lung’ to the city, Gateway Park punctuates the main flows by ‘encounters areas’ where all users share a common space for the expression of civic behavior. A sensor mesh captures in real time the park’s environmental parameters of human physiological comfort (air temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, pollution particles or noise pollution). This data is then graphically transcribed, in real time, by a smartphone application that can be accessed by visitors who wish to align their schedules to a fluctuating but legible environment
This “smart” park system is relayed by a maintenance center North of the site, interfaced between the populations and the gardeners of the park, a wastewater treatment center in the South, completed at both ends of the site. Photovoltaic fields (1ha) and an information pavilion for news and events of the park. The energy produced by the 4000 photovoltaic panels in the North and South ensures the autonomy of lighting and other equipment’s in the park. The maintenance center and the educational pavilions are a complement to the cultural programming of the information center which is focused on issues concerning the planet earth.
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