2022 Design Festival Theme:
X PARK @Xintiandi—A Plan of “Micro Nature & Micro Park”
It makes the drifting souls find its habitats; it brings the most novel experience and meets the unsettled curiosity; it injects diversified interests into ordinary urban life; it is an impromptu stage where people meet and intersect; it mixes the abstract and most contemporary concepts, technology and knowledge into a concrete and enlightening environment. Of course, it may also be a green world where you can touch the nature among all the hustle and bustle.
Celebrating the 6th edition of Design Shanghai @Xintiandi Design Festival, we hope to find answers to this question with various kinds of creators, including architects and designers. Expanding the Design Festival beyond the narrow sense of "design" itself and entering the discussion of "urban design" in a more macro and ecological dimension will be the basis of this year's theme—Park. More precisely, “X Park” is the main object anchored in our design mission this year.
More than just a commercial complex, Xintiandi remains a street block in a larger sense. Bamboo shoots which spring up in the 2022 Design Festival seem as “micro parks”. Those are the alternative attempts to explore new public spaces centering on the street block concept.
-Is there a way to bring natural elements into a city minimizing resource consumption? Meanwhile, can these micro green spaces make the whole block more habitable (lingering), intriguing and lively? Can they reflect the green and sustainable concept advocated by Xintiandi?
A Place to Connect with NATURE
A Place to Connect with PEOPLE
A Place to Connect with INSPIRATION
It offers an experiment space for design with infinite possibilities in a city.
It can be an artificial natural space, a democratic public space unprogrammed and free for uses not yet conceived. Architects and designers could build their own “Micro Parks” of installations, interior spaces and artistic creation (or real parks) to:
-emphasize nature’s gifts of light, sunlight and moonlight, air, gravity, materials, natural and man-made resources.
-display a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture's agenda, focusing on the quality of space itself.
-focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and, on its ability, to address the unspoken wishes of strangers.
-celebrates architecture’s capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project - even within the most private, defensive, exclusive or commercially restricted conditions.
-encourages reviewing ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, of inventing solutions where architecture provides for the well-being and dignity of each citizen of this fragile planet.
Design Shanghai @Xintiandi Design Festival invites you to build your own metaphorical park
and invite people to experience it,
to play together inside of it,
to enjoy solitude…
Or just take selfie with it.
