Phase Shifts Park (Central Park) - 11a Biennal 2021

Ricky Liu associates, Catherine Mosbach, Philippe Rahm architectes

Phase Shifts Park (Central Park)

Situated beneath the Tropic of Cancer, the climate of
Taiwan is warmed by the Kuro-Shio, one of the largest
marine currents in the world. The island possesses a hot
and humid tropical climate that counterbalances
the mountain range that has a fresher environment. The
target of Central Park is to give back the outdoors
to the inhabitants by creating landscapes where the
excesses of the climate of Taichung are reshaped.
The park use a specific language, one of universal reach in
its capacity to relate the issues at stake at different scales.
The geographic scale by the transformation of an airport
into an urban landscape; the urban scale by the provision
of unique cultural facilities integrated into a vast public
terrain; the domestic scale in the porosity between
districts that allow sharing of recreational opportunities.
The interlocking of these levels is a unique achievement.
The design tools explore lithosphere design -water,
topography, soil- combined with atmosphere design -
heat, humidity, pollution. An overlapping mapping
organizes a range of landscape distributing more
comfortable ‘niches’ where natural and artificial tools are
mixed, densified and dilated to highlight eleven
comfortable resorts. The atmosphere performing is
emphases by the lithosphere resources running with
singular path through leisure’s lands, sports lands and
plays lands. The landscape pulls from North to South.
Urban traffic is partially covered by infrastructures
incorporated into the ground of the park. On the surface
the hills establish a framework of vast horizons and
continuities. Yet standing before them, they are also
intimate and protective, for the staging of cultural events
or regular shelter with Northern Lounge, Eastern Spiral,
Middle Yard, Eastern Sky dome and Middle Clearings.
The park acts as a moderator: it proposes a variety of
beaches, of gardens, of places and offer to the people
of Taichung sensual experiences, partly based on the
principle of senses of Rudolf Steiner, with twelve
Fields -Speech, Taste, Hearing, Equilibrium, Thinking,
Vision, Movement, Ego, Touch, Warmth, Smell,
Lifeproviding visitors with places of gaming, meeting or
just walk around powerful landscapes. The leisure’s lands,
sport lands and play lands transform all that cross its vast,
folded ground stretching. This topographic range allows
residents to gain height and distance from their daily
rhythms while being immersed in a living environment
that is in constant formation. The ground introduces
anfractuosities that protect passers-by from urban traffic
while ensuring the continuity of ecological migration
corridors, running 2.7km south to north, of animal, plant
and human populations.

The maintenance center and the educational pavilions
completed the cultural programming of the visitor
center which is focused on issues concerning the planet
earth. It propose a unique public space where one can feel
good, and can spend good time protected from the
heat, where you can relax away from pollution, where you
could have fun in the open air with your children. The park
is the essential and necessary one today, of well-being, of
comfort and sensual pleasures to bring to the inhabitants
of big metropolitan cities.
Crossing, beyond appearances
Homo sapiens is an epiphenomenon among others, ahead
of exploration and translation tools. It is urgent
that it be placed back into the heart of its milieu, rather
than existing in a divisive center using the ‘green’
mode to compensate for its abusive footprint. Our human
form is just a passing phase, a transit of materials like
many other transits – making this principle accessible
would radically change our behavior on Gaia. It would be a
revolution of another ‘nature’ than the historical, scientific
or even ecological – the current ultimate slogan –
revolutions, and could show up the advances in our tools
as mere implosions of vanities. Becoming part of the
landscape shows up our human form, a transformation
among others. We are privileged to be able to test and
play with these infinite scores, to highlight them,
grounded in a reality adapted to our scale by our
interpretation.

We are On the wire (Sur le fil), as Georges Didi-Huberman
(2001) writes: "To work for others supposes
reterritorializing one’s own work ... to migrate one’s work
from one social field to another ... They (Les
oeuvres sans queue ni chef) ... are created according to
the reterritorialized economy of the ‘producers’ who
aim not to impose their name (their brand) in the closed
world of a single discipline, but more modestly to enable
‘the work itself to communicate’ from one world to
another."
Central Park forges dynamic interactions between
environments and the inhabitant. Facilities allow residents
to become aware of invisible resources and to enjoy their
value within an everyday lifestyle. Beyond providing for
the comfort, the ground folding is a tool parameterized
according to porosity gradients. A little hole in the soil
retains water, which in contact with oxygen germinates a
seed, and little by little, a plant becomes landscape. The
stratigraphy of soil is correlated to the stratigraphy of
vegetation, which provides long-term indices of storm
water runoff and air quality engaging resorts.
Vegetative gradients ‘punctuating’ the park use the
diversity of Taiwanese biomes to emphasize areas from
the least hot, to the least polluted, to the least wet. Each
series of vegetation and installations distinguishes a
garden within the park. In addition to introducing a vast
'green lung' to the city, Central Park punctuates the main
flows by 'encounters areas' where users share a common
space for the expression of civic behavior.

A sensor mesh captures the park's environmental
parameters of human physiological comfort (air
temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, pollution
particles or noise pollution). This data is then
graphically transcribed, in real-time, by a smartphone
application accessible by visitors who wish to align
their schedules to a fluctuating but legible environment.
This "smart" park system is relayed by a maintenance
center North of the site and a waste water treatment
center in the South. The energy produced by the
photovoltaic panels (1ha) in the North and South ensures
the autonomy of lighting and other equipment in the park.

Autors

Ricky Liu associates

Catherine Mosbach

Mosbach paysagistes

Philippe Rahm architectes