Optical Valley Green Ring (First Prize)

Half city, half nature- A soft landmark to enhance the urban environment in Wuhan

When thinking about reaching the carbon-neutral goal worldwide in 30 years, we have a mission to design every architecture to be artificial element and a part of nature at the same time. With its free flowing yet well-crafted shape, the green ring integrates transportation hub, a busy city intersection with a park, connecting the neighborhoods and creates multiple public spaces. It juxtaposes slow with fast, greenery and high traffic. Its undulating shape originated from the way it interacts with individual neighborhoods at each corner of the intersection. While re-connecting the four communities which were fragmented by the two city drives, the green ring provides bike lanes and pedestrian walkways above and inside. The intention is to encourage the use of bicycles as the primary means of commuting rather than driving. Initially thought of as the problem, the massiveness of the intersection is now an advantage to create the diversity of public spaces around this curvy and free-formed ring. Its ever-changing section shows how it varies its public pro-grams from one to another.