“Horseland” sports space and playground in Chongqing and Playground “The Shower” in Shanghai

Colourful playscapes to stimulate interaction

published in sb 4/2020

Horseland is a public space project comprising a combination of landscape design and vari­ous outdoor elements in a single space, such as sports features, playground features for kids and leisure features for adults. 100 Architects is following up on its serial theme of “horses”. The design of this vibrant and multifunctional public space resembles the abstract geometry of a horse when viewed from the air.

Inspired by the circular sketching strokes commonly used to draw animals’ anatomy, the circle was used as the basic geometry to depict the different parts of the horse’s body, as a design strategy to subdivide the space into ­multiple smaller functional pockets to convert the playground into a multifunctional space to be enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

Applying this idea to the spatial organisation strategy of the project, the idea was to create a multifunctional public space by combining and intersecting smaller independent portions of circles, using smaller circles for simple functions and larger circles for more elaborate ones.