This fall, a team of 15 graduate students and three professors from the School of Architecture will design green space in an urban setting between Tsinghua University and the Forbidden City in central Beijing.
"A green space is similar to a park but is also a way to provide a connection with pedestrians and nature, which is a long tradition in China," said Fritz Steiner, dean of the school of architecture. "We're building one out of a tradition that exists."
The group traveled to Beijing in May to study modern and ancient Chinese architecture and meet a design architect for the 2008 Olympics.
Graduate architecture students have collaborated often with other countries, including Mexico and Italy, to design building and landscape projects. The project in China will be the first to incorporate three different fields of architecture: architecture, landscape architecture and community and regional planning.
The system of green spaces will include covered walkways, pavilions, water elements, walkways, seating and lighting. The ideal location for the "pocket park," or green space, is in a large, urban setting between Tsinghua University and the Forbidden City in central Beijing.
"Besides the collaboration with the Chinese, students are excited about working with cross disciplines which they don't have many opportunities to do," Steiner said. "Hopefully this will lead to more cooperation and create more livable, healthy and vibrant places."
The series of parks to be created will draw inspiration from sites the students saw while in China, such as the Great Wall of China and the Olympic Forest Park, developed for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Students and faculty met with the Hu Jie, chief designer of the park and professor at Tsinghua University in China.
"It's interesting how China's changed since I was an undergraduate," said landscape architecture graduate student Erin Bernstein, who toured China before going there for school. "The whole city's under development. We hope to incorporate the principles of historic traditional gardens designed once for the wealthy with pocket parks of today."
Students and faculty also visited Suzhou and Hangzhou, two small cities south of Beijing, to see private gardens.
"I was very excited. [China]'s an amazing country," said Julia Barton Diana, a community and regional planning architecture graduate student. "We saw world-class architecture."
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