DAD, SCUT, and Polito Studio team takes the podium at the Jinyun competition
The municipality of Jinyun in China's Zhejiang Province has announced the results of the Jinyun YangTanTou District Urban Design Competition. Among the more than 80 participants in the competition, the team formed by professors and researchers from the Department of Architecture and Design-DAD – China Room, together with professionals from Polito Studio, the Design Institute of South China University of Technology (SCUT), and Shanghai Sishi Business Consulting Co., Ltd., won second place overall in the competition in early September, confirming the strength of a decade-long relationship with its Chinese partners in competitions focusing on urban and architectural design. In fact, in 2020, a PoliTO-SCUT consortium won third place in the “Future ShanShui City” competition for the territorial development of the nearby town of Lishui, promoting a model of urban growth aimed at rebalancing the relationship between city and countryside in the context of contemporary China's transformation.
The international urban design competition for the Jinyun riverfront, launched last May, focused on a valuable resource of buildable land located between the historic center and the newly built districts. Aimed at national and international teams, the competition sought to transform the Yangtantou area, with its strong symbolic and landscape value, into a model of urban design for the entire Zhejiang Province. The top three teams will be involved in the actual transformation of the area.
The DAD/SCUT group was selected last June as one of the five finalists in the competition, based on criteria such as the reputation of the project team, previous experience in similar projects, and the overall capabilities of the participants in terms of research, planning, and innovation. Among the finalists, in addition to the winning project by the Zhejiang Provincial Design Institute of Urban and Rural Planning, Olivier Greder Architecture + China United Engineering, SWA Group + GAO Creative + Shenzhen Huayang International Engineering and Design, and China Eco-City Research Institute + URBANGENE + KLCP Construction and Design Consulting tied for third place.
The team's proposal, entitled “Shanshui Jinyun District: An Urban Living Room of Culture and Vitality”, reimagined the site as a sequence of low-density public functions, capable of connecting the topography of the surrounding mountains and the river landscape within new connective spaces.
“A way to reinterpret the meaning of landscape in Chinese culture, in Chinese ‘shan-shui’, literally ‘mountains and waters’,” emphasizes Edoardo Bruno of DAD, Chief Designer of the proposal conducted with his colleagues from the China Room Michele Bonino, Yicheng Wang, Alp Arda, Lidia Preti, and Camilla Forina, “where the settlement principles adopted have led to interventions in which natural elements prevail, crossing the entire area and defining the visual framework of the entire project."
In this way, the Yangtantou riverfront becomes a large park inhabited by cultural, commercial, and outdoor sports facilities, whose public space is the ecological backbone of the area: it organizes building density, connects agricultural spaces and green areas, and integrates pedestrian use with the need to be easily connected to other urbanized areas in the Jinyun core.
Working alongside DAD professors and researchers, the Polito Studio team actively contributed to the design, representing a concrete opportunity for collaboration between professionals and academic institutions. Polito Studio, the result of an agreement between PoliTO and the Order of Architects of Turin, is now in its fourth year and aims to internationalize the profession. Teams of professionals selected through public calls for tenders work alongside the university for two years on international projects based on real cases, thus training themselves in their respective markets. A first team of six Turin-based studios, selected in 2021 following training, founded TDH Ltd. Co. in Shanghai last year, while a new team, selected in 2024, joined forces with DAD in the Jingyun competition.
The collaboration took place through a series of joint workshops between PoliTO researchers, and the professionals involved, with colleagues from TDH acting as tutors, with the aim of transferring knowledge about the project area and the practices of formalizing competition proposals in the Chinese context. As confirmed by architect Alessandro Servalli (member of the Polito Studio team together with Alessandro Cacioppo, Francesco Carota, and Gabriele Gatti): “Taking part in this experience meant engaging with an international horizon that stimulates cultural and professional growth: an opportunity to intertwine different design visions and, together with researchers from PoliTO and SCUT, give shape to new perspectives on the theme of urban design.”
