Sasaki
Sasaki is excited to announce that the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has chosen Xuhui Runway Park as the Honor Award Urban Design winner for this year’s ASLA Professional Awards.
This year ASLA received 486 eligible entries, of which 40 received awards. The program recognizes the best of landscape architecture in general design, analysis and planning, communications, research, urban design, landmark, and residential design categories from the United States and around the world.
The official awards ceremony will take place at the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in Nashville, Tennessee on Saturday, November 20, 2021.
Congratulations to the Sasaki team and to all the other winning projects! We are honored to have been recognized amongst all the incredible entries.
Read on for more information about the project.
Xuhui Runway Park was built as a catalyst for the urban regeneration of Shanghai’s Xuhui Riverfront District. By establishing a state-of-the-art public realm at the heart of this former industrial district, the park has set a new model for innovative urban revitalization. With a design that mimics the motion of a runway, diverse series of linear spaces for vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians organize the park and street into one interconnected sequence. This “runway of modern life,” offers recreational space for nearby office workers, students, and residents, and provides respite from the surrounding high-density redevelopment.
In bright fall colors, four rows of Sapindus mukorossi and two rows of Ginkgo biloba shade the boulevard, creating human-scaled spaces, seasonal effects, and a pleasant driving, riding, and walking experience
Gently sloped pathways introduce ascending and descending movements to the park, mimicking the experience of being on an airplane to connect visitors to the site’s past
“In rapidly developing Shanghai, a former airport runway becomes a linear park between high-rises, redistributed through careful interventions as runways not for planes but for trains, automobiles, bicycles, and people—done at scale with both intimate and expansive spaces.”
2021 ASLA Awards Jury
The project’s design promotes public transit, bicycle use, accessibility, community programming, as well as stormwater mitigation, habitat creation, material preservation and reuses. These strong sustainable initiatives have led to the park’s recognition as the first SITES Gold certified landscape in mainland China. The Xuhui Runway Park project transcends time and space, blending the site’s celebrated past with the contemporary urban center while setting a new standard for the reclamation of public space in Shanghai.
This is the first project in mainland China to ever receive a SITES certification and the first project in all of China to receive a SITES Gold-level certification
The project received a Merit Award from the Design For Asia Awards
Metropolis, Dezeen, and others celebrate this pioneering SITES Gold park in Shanghai
Xuhui Runway Park has been shortlisted for landscape project of the year
