A public square-cum-lagoon situated in southern Taiwan’s Tainan City was listed May 9 as one of the world’s top 10 new architecture projects in an article written by Rowan Moore, published by U.K.-based The Guardian.
“Making a virtue out of global lockdown, our critic takes a virtual tour of the world’s best new architecture projects — from a rural Vietnamese preschool to a Belgian folly and a synagogue in Paraguay,” award-winning architecture critic Rowan Moore introduced the list in his piece published on The Guardian on May 9.
In Rowan Moore’s writing, Tainan Spring was mentioned, "Most towns and cities have one: a senescent shopping center once hailed as an economic engine, now overstaying its welcome like a kitchen appliance that the binmen won’t take away. Tainan Spring offers a bold and direct response. Here the ruins of the China-Town mall, built over an old harbor in 1983, have been made into a public “lagoon”, whose levels change with dry and rainy seasons, and with cooling vapor mists when it’s hot. It’s promised that the vegetation will become lush in three years, in evocation of the jungle that was there before the city came."
According to MVRDV, a Netherlands-based architecture and urban design practice founded in 1993, Tainan Spring creates " a new landscape strategy to unify the site of the former China Town Mall and a kilometer-long stretch of the city’s Haian Road."
The underlying concept of the project is to encourage the growth of luxuriant vegetation and return the site within three years to a state resembling the natural conditions of the area before human settlement.
For detailed information, please visit the official website of MVRDV and The Guardian (https://bit.ly/3658Ns8)
