this is a master plan for a big commercial development in wuhu, anhui province in a site with an existing public park and two large water bodies.

blocks of shopping malls, entertainment and restaurant complexes, offices and a hotel, each with their particular experiences are joined around the site by a meandering three-level semi-outdoor shopping street mass. different people with different consumption patterns are expected to come to this new urban node strategically situated in between the old city centre and the proposed new city extension.

like molten lava, the semi-outdoor street-shopping experience are programmed in concentric layers around nodal concentrations of more internalised shopping.

several voids in the lava allow relief from or else heighten the intensity of consumption activities.

while creating different scales of settings throughout the site, the built substances shaping these do not have conventional hierarchy. we avoided articulating them into iconic forms or conventional urban gestures, but simply to allow them to concentrate or disperse according to site conditions.

we imagine them to be able to make different kinds of experiences (urban/not urban, ‘free’/not ‘free’, communal/intimate, inside/outside) out of the same substance.