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UCL Views

UCL Views is a series of images reflecting the curiosities, passions, investigations and imaginings of the UCL community.

This set of UCL Views showcases success by staff at the UCL Faculty of the Built Environment in two competitions last week.

A team from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture has won first prize in the Hakka Cultural Park Competition in the city of Heyuan, Guangdong Province in China.

Professor Christine Hawley (Dean of the Faculty of the Built Environment), Andrew Porter, Abigail Ashton, and Bartlett graduate Moyang Yang beat off competition from Chinese and Australian practices to win first place with a design that includes plans for a museum of Hakka Culture, a city library, an exhibition hall as well as 1.3km strip of landscaped park.

The Bartlett proposal makes reference to the primary forms of Hakka housing, which are predominantly circular with central courtyards. They have a defensive perimeter wall with a single small entrance door.

The design comprises a series of rectangular frames which foreground the features of the landscape and mark the locations of the museum, the library, the exhibition hall, the sculpture park and belvedere. These five frames represent the five key waves of migration of Hakka people within China. The belvedere, a turret built for the purposes of viewing the surrounding scene, is located on a peak that offers a lookout over the city centre.

Professor CJ Lim (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and Pro-Provost for Canada, Mexico and the USA) has won a 2009 Great Place Planning Award from the Environmental Design Research Association, USA for his project Guangming Sustainable Park, Shenzhen, China. The 2.4 square kilometre park plan was commissioned by the Chinese government in 2008.

Eschewing conventions of traditional urban parks, the plan seeks to create a framework for sustainable engagement with the urbanisation of a previously agricultural area, bringing organic farming, art, recreation, and energy production into the centre of Guangming New Town.

The jury praised both the plan’s design and the fact it has already encouraged a conversation on sustainable planning between the Chinese government, local communities, and environmental agencies. Its inclusion of both agriculture and cultural activities, recreation and energy production, provides a model for park design in China and other fast-urbanising areas of the world.

The UCL Bartlett, made up of the Schools of Architecture, Construction and Project Management, Graduate Studies, Planning and the Development Planning Unit, offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the built environment. The school is at the forefront of the debate on the future of cities and uses London as a unique laboratory for studying the architectural, constructional and urban situations that affect the built environment.

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