Tianjin C-Land Great Habitat Plaza

The C-LAND Group commercial project is located in Wuqing Development Zone, Tianjin. Flanking a city river, this project is a regional shopping center in a growing urban area. The total building area is about 70000 square meters, with 4 floors above the ground and 2 floors underground. The main design goal is to create a unique commercial building, integrating retail, supermarket, cinema and children's entertainment by promoting a new leisure and social culture for the young generation. The design sets up a link between the city and the community, and brings vitality for a better urban environment through the unique building spaces both indoors and outdoors.

The transition from the city interface to the community interface is a transition from large scale ‘rocks’ to human scale ‘crystals’. The design seeks inspiration from the northern mountains of Tianjin, and uses traditional cutting and carving methods to cut out crystal shaped volumes. The crystals acts as a backdrop to the activities and the flow of people, making the link between the city and the community a memorable impression.

In classical Chinese culture, visiting mountains and rivers is considered to be an undertaking with strong social and poetic meanings. We have created a public path for tours, from the B1 floor to the top floor, meandering among the ‘crystals’. Each outdoor terrace and platform extends and interacts with the interior activities. The ‘hiking’ journey starts from a large sunken plaza with serves as an outdoor food plaza, and ends on the fourth floor leading into the indoor winter atrium. The outdoor hiking route expands the indoor shopping circulation, adding a relaxing lifestyle touch to the otherwise enclosed shopping environment.