The recent announcement of Kongjian Yu, FASLA, as the winner of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize sent us back to the archives for this piece on his work at Hing Hay Park in Seattle.
—October 26, 2023
By Betsy Anderson, Associate ASLA
On a steely afternoon in late January, the soft notes of a dizi floated over the sound of construction in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The flutist played amid a line of safety fencing and the maneuvers of a carry deck crane. This was not an unusual scene in a city filled with building projects, in a neighborhood that proudly cradles cultural expression. But today, anyone crossing the intersection of 6th Avenue South and South King Street would not be greeted by the usual half-built shell of a mid-rise. Instead, a much less orderly silhouette emerged on the street corner. Asymmetrical, animalistic, and unapologetically red—a bending steel-clad structure reached up, piece by piece, to embrace the district’s most recently completed park.
“You need a touch,” says Kongjian Yu, FASLA, whose Beijing firm, Turenscape, led the park’s conceptual design. “You need one stroke—that’s important. Otherwise it becomes too quiet. The whole tone of Hing Hay Park is red,” he continues, explaining the new gate. “We want to keep the sense of ‘Hing Hay,’ which means happiness.”
The gesture was a long time coming. The gate’s crisp concrete plinths were ready for the park’s opening six months earlier and waited, fringed by purple moor grass. People in the community held their breath as the bold structure they’d known only through renderings came to life. In the intervening months, the gateway had transformed itself from an iconic design feature and technical achievement to a symbol of tension, embodying the debate that emerges whenever a neighborhood with a…
Read the full article here