A variety of entertainment, sports, and retail facilities groups around a central lake to form a super-large commercial complex, with architecture and facades in complementary scales of terraced three-dimensional pixels.
Downhill Pixels
Promoted by the 2022 Winter Olympics, snow sports have become a popular leisure activity among the younger generations of China. In collaboration with Wuhan Urban Construction Group, CLOU has conceived the design of a new, comprehensive type of all-year entertainment complex with a snow theme, to be completed in Wuhan in 2022.
In a well-composed combination of indoor winter sports, outdoor theme park playground, and connective retail street, Wuhan Sunac Snow World appeals to the amusement appetite of one of the most populous cities in China, and sets precedent for a new type of super-large all-inclusive entertainment landmark.
Curated as a stage for 24-hour enjoyment around a large lake, the masterplan arrays carnival vibes, indoor and outdoor shopping precincts, watersports and the abstracted vision of a mountain in the immersive experience of a singular super-sized complex.
Enclosing three different leisure experiences – indoor snow adventures, an extensive outdoor carnival landscape, and a variety of indoor and outdoor retail – three different building typologies of contrasting scale are unified in the framework of complementary design language. A modular façade system embraces collective elements that are then decomposed and reorganised in order to create identity and establish synergies.
Under the half-kilometer-long and 100m high indoor ski slope with its snowflake-pattern pixelated façade, foothills full of sports and nightlife venues scatter towards the waterside, linking plazas and retail streets with generously landscaped areas and interactive facades.
Indoor spaces dissolve towards the outdoors, to activate internal and external retail areas with entertainment facilities and landscapes, and to connect to the adjacent transportation nodes.