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Wetland Research and Education Center Atelier Z+ 2019
PlantSite/ SHANGHAI, CHINA. AREA : 4092 m²2
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Located at the easternmost point of Chongming Island, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Dongtan Wetland is a sort of estuary tidal flat wetland. This wetland sits in the middle of the “East Asia - Australia” route which is known as one of the eight migration routes for birds of the world. The whole project was completed in 2019. As a supporting facility of this project, the Research and Education Center was built as an important platform of scientific research monitoring, bird banding, law enforcement of management and protection, science education.
Besides, it serves for raising both awareness and display of ecological and environmental protection as well as promote worldwide cooperation and exchange.
Site Plan
With the intention of minimizing the impact on the local ecosystem whenever this place is under construction or in use, the architectural volume is divided and scattered, forming a group of settlements above the piling platform, floating on the water and hidden among the reeds.
Five buildings of different volumes including the conference and exhibition, the canteen, the research, and the dormitory are cross-connected by a zigzag trestle bridge. Through the conversion of prototype and the control of scale, the atmosphere of indoor and outdoor spaces could be in response to the environment specificity such as sky, wetland, reeds, and flying birds.
Instead, reinforced concrete is selected to build with the simplicity of tectonics. Building A, B, C were built by a Y-shaped cantilevered reinforced concrete bent frame structure with crisscross section and partial folded-plate. Among these buildings, the cantilever of building A was so large that the whole structure had to be constructed with steel-reinforced concrete and the exhibition hall was partly designed with steel mezzanine; buildings D and E were constructed with concrete folded-plate structure. In order to expose the crudeness from the concrete structure in wetland, long pine timber formworks were used in the as-cast-finish concrete construction to obtain natural wood texture. The non-structural enclosure and partition walls were also coated with refurbished recycled timber formworks to unify the material expression.
he trestle bridge and the water platform were paved with precast concrete battens with cracks left between each other.
