A Chinese success story

The project of the Tangshan Urban Planning Museum and Park by Urbanus shows the human face of the new Chinese architecture

Nowadays, the frenetic urbanization in China illustrated by eccentric designs in Beijing and frontier cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, has driven the secondary tier cities to copy development models that are unsuitable to their economic reality, nor appropriate to their urban characteristics. The architects from Urbanus consider that it is necessary and urgent in today’s practice to set a model for less developed cities to demonstrate how to install decent urbanity from a banal setting. This is exactly the case of the Tangshan Urban Planning Museum and Park. A grain depot on the edge of the old city was saved, incorporated into the newly developed park system and transformed into a museum complex. It reveals the rich and sometimes turbulent past of the city, and it is also a place to demonstrate the hope, the resilience and the vision of the people in this city.
The Tangshan Urban Planning Museum and Park tells a story that the banal city from its featureless surface has something in its deep structure that could be remarkable, worthy to save, and waiting to be explored… A meaningful city, a memorable life is not in a far away land of utopian, but lies right next to you, in your neighbourhoods, if you are willing to make the effort.

More about the project on p. 76 – 83 in the new issue of Abitare Bulgaria