Promoted by the Beijing Winter Olympics, snow sports have become a popular leisure activity among the younger generations of China. The recently completed Wuhan Ski Resort combines the actual sports facilities with hotels, retail, theme parks and other entertainment amenities, and complement them with ski schools, ski clubs, and professional sports events, creating this new type of entertainment complex with a snow theme.
Project Name: Wuhan Ski Resort
Studio Name: CLOU architects
Location: Wuhan, Hubei, China
Area: 178,000 sqm
Design Director: Jan F. Clostermann
Design Team: Zhi Zhang, Sebastian Loaiza, Zihao Ding, Liang Hao, Yiqiao Zhao, Christopher Biggin, Principia Wardhani, Artur Nitribitt, Jing Shuang Zhao, Liu Liu, Yinuo Zhou, Yuan Yuan Sun, Haiwei Xie
Photography: Arch Exist, Shrimp Studio
Located in the Huangpi district adjacent to Mulan Ancient Town, Wuhan Ski Resort is set to be the new contemporary landmark of the area: a variety of entertainment, sports, and retail facilities groups around a central lake, to form a super-large commercial complex that promotes snow sports all-year-round.
In a well-composed combination of indoor winter sports, connective retail street , and outdoor theme park playground, Wuhan Ski Resort sets precedent for a new type of all-inclusive entertainment.
Curated as a stage for 24-hour lakeside enjoyment, the masterplan arrays carnival vibes, indoor and outdoor shopping precincts, watersports and the abstracted vision of a mountain in the immersive experience of a singular super-sized complex, where architecture and surfaces merge in complementary scales of terraced three-dimensional pixels.
Enclosing three different leisure experiences, three different building typologies of contrasting scale are unified in the framework of an integral design language. Wuhan Ski Resort appeals to the amusement appetite of one of the most populous cities in China. Its half-kilometer-long and 100 m high indoor ski slope sets precedent for a new type of indoor winter sports.
Below the half-kilometer-long and 100m high indoor ski slope with its pixelated multi-media façade, foothills full of sports and nightlife venues scatter towards the waterside, linking plazas and retail streets with generously landscaped areas and interactive facades.
Indoor spaces dissolve into the outdoors, to activate internal and external retail areas with entertainment facilities and landscapes, and to connect to the adjacent transportation nodes.
