Yantai Mountain Urban Development Project by Urbanus Architecture & Design in Fuzhou

Project: Commercial renovation of a pedestrian walkway block on Yantai Mountain in Fuzhou by Vanke
Architects: Urbanus Architecture & Design
Location: Fujian, China
Photography: Archie, ZY Studio

Yantai Mountain Urban Development Project by Urbanus Architecture & Design

"Living cities possess wonderful innate abilities to understand, communicate, create and invent what is needed to overcome difficulties."

— Jane Jefferson

Where does a city's vitality come from?

From the beginning, urban commercial projects are designed to generate and coordinate various functions in order to meet diverse and complex needs of different users. To bring a city to life, designers must experience real urban life, understand the complexity and diversity of the urban environment, and carefully reconstruct and build.

Wizardry of Light

As an important urban public space, street design encompasses all aspects of daily human life. If a road has the memory of a city—whether it is childhood memories or modern smart cities—it shows that life on the streets is closely linked to urban prosperity. As a main showcase of a city's cultural identity, it can directly reflect the level of civilization and cultural essence of the city.

The Yantai Mountain in Vanke Glamourevival is located at the end of the traditional central axis sequence in ancient Fuzhou. Surrounded by northern and southern river ports of Min River, it possesses unique geographical advantages and maintains an original ecological space where Chinese and Western cultures meet. The fully open commercial block of Yantai Mountain reveals a chapter connecting past and future along the Min River.

With years of experience in street development design, Fun Connection preserved the original form of the Yantai Mountain block while conducting transformation of public street development with emphasis on facade reconstruction, visual update, greening, and commercial building packaging. This old historical complex redeveloped the street development, improving atmosphere and style, guiding urban renovation and restoration, enhancing the vitality of public spaces in the city, and solving practical business challenges.

Following this narrative, a progressive routing is created where the natural openness and freedom of the block’s commercial street allow consumers to relax, release tension, and enjoy leisure.

The thematic block features offer consumers an immersive experience as if traveling through time and space, feeling a blend of historical and modern elements. Additionally, the vibrant and active block with an atmosphere of literature and art welcomes consumers from various groups, bringing new energy and charm to business through a combination of old and new, as well as the intersection of past and present.

What Is Living and Active Life?

Chinese writer Wang Zengzi said: "Living and active life lies in the taste of food."

The most vivid and simple thing in this world is the aroma of cooking rising up and penetrating through street noise. The scent of coffee and strolling along streets and alleys is a response to slow, living life.

As the increasingly empty and aging public layer needs a way to record and transmit unique local cultural identity through social memory, Yantai Mountain City creates a new 'cultural memory space', forming a social field for 'everyday life'.

Through the creation of thematic commercial scenes and visual consistency, Fun Connection builds diverse and dynamic social spaces through symbols, flags, and logos to meet the daily social needs of various groups such as elderly people, children, tourists, etc. Introducing key visual elements creates visual attention and forms collective memory with local characteristics.

Creating progressive scenes and a narrative approach that establishes order and rhythm builds visual perception of motion and stillness, which harmoniously blend. Sometimes lively, sometimes a cozy walking alleyway, other times a place for exploring novelty. These various scenes and moods endow business with different emotional experiences.

Here, the linear expanding street development around the main axis becomes the core of circulation throughout the entire district, spreading romantic imagination and emotions. Following the original design intention to 'create a light urban atmosphere and scenes', the overall design minimizes structural differences existing in the original street to bring out comfortable and natural creative points with strong visual effect, making all spaces more consistent and harmonious.

By opening up street facades, Fun Connection creates a light street atmosphere, integrating different architectural open spaces and organizing photogenic points for social media to meet basic visitor behavioral actions—standing, sitting, talking, and drinking together. It redefines places of stay corresponding to various scenarios, revealing the connection between the block and human feelings.

Streets Creating a Sense of Familiarity in Life

Returning to the commercial perspective of the project, creating an atmosphere sets a reasonable composition and commercial tone for subsequent tenants. By integrating business boundaries with vision, crossing culture and time, the design avoids subordination to trends and styles, thereby maintaining independence and uniqueness. At the same time, diverse integration and appropriate penetration create a clear and logical spatial structure.

The project offers cozy and natural ideas with strong visual impact to convey the 'feeling of familiarity in life', creating an aesthetic street appearance that continues to be alive in daily life and brings effective IP formation and commercial value for local real estate and business.

-Project description and images provided by ZZ Media