To build on this lakeside green-field inside a park, the architects opt to subdue the building and allow the landscape to prevail. The essence is to literally lift-up the ‘green’ layer of the park and insert building functions underneath, by which means the public domain remains uninterrupted by private use. The spherical roof offers the park visitors a short-cut to the main bridge, and also a privilege venue overlooking the Lake, which has been,in real life, loved by the visitors. The photographers very often shoot panoramas of the Park from this point, and as a result, many of their photos look similar. In addition, those roof top flora-beds planted with various colours can make an interesting collage from the high-rise-living residents’ points of view.
While the building volume in particular the service area has a minimum exposure towards the main road, the customer area, the dining hall gains maximum visual contact with the Lake. Rather, the dining area resembles a ‘theatre’, except that the bigger,instead of the smaller, end is the ‘stage’, where the scene is ‘performing’ through a 30meter long full-height curvy window. The floor of the dining hall split into three levels linked by ramps and steps, surrounded by clustered boxes (private rooms) with one-sidedview to the stalls (dining hall) and another side to the sunken patios planted with bamboo and paved with gravel. To retain intimacy with the water, the lowest floor level is set 900mm above regional flood level. This area is bridged to an even lower platform standing in a reed pond, which is not only to be used as an outdoor dining area, but also the third exit and meeting point in times of emergency.
The management office is lifted to a mezzanine above the service counter. This room,undera tilted roof and cladded with standing-seam zinc panels, is perhaps the only statement made to the public attention – this is a commercial building after all. The kitchen and ancillary rooms are laid into the split-level basement, which is served through a service compound sunken from the street level and well hidden from the public attention. For this area, a footbridge is designed for evacuation, emergency and logistic access.
The grids of roof top flora beds are not onlybased on visual requirement, but also on the pattern of reversed structural beams. This system was chosen to discourage suspended ceilings which could be an easy choice for the final user to cover up the normal dropping-down beams. The exposure of the heavy weight reinforced concrete slab enables passive-cooling with the aid of night-purge under stack effect, which is realised between the louver-shaded high-level ventilation tower and the low-level open-able panels of the huge window. The building envelope also features 800mm earth fill over XPS insulation on the roof and sandwich-type insulation between fair-faced in-situ concrete external walls.
