The Gongshu Canal Sports Park, the only newly-built Asian Games venue cluster in downtown Hangzhou, includes a gymnasium, a stadium, a square and two centers.

The Gongshu Canal Sports Park will host table tennis, breakdancing and hockey competitions during the Games. The gym has a double curved surface fish scale-shaped walls, and the hockey field is designed to resemble an oiled paper umbrella.

The park was designed by a team led by Archi-Tectonics, a New York-based firm founded by Winka Dubbeldam, architect and Chair of Architecture at University of Pennsylvania.

In an interview with the School, she shared details on incorporating sustainable components into the district, and working collaboratively in a virtual environment to design the park and monitor construction.

The article was published on Jan 23rd on the official website of Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

It is the biggest built project that Winka and her team have completed. And the buildings were required to be in continuous use. Instead of having the stadia cluster on the middle road, the designers separated them in the two halves of the park and connected them with a valley village and a shopping mall.

To achieve the sustainable aspects of the design, the team planned to restore the wetlands and use natural cooling systems for the buildings. They cooled the indoor seating areas rather than the whole stadium to save energy.

The global outbreak of COVID-19 did not affect Winka so much. "I was done with my site visits in November 2019. We were always supposed to work virtually from then on," she said.

While working from a distance, she checked the buildings with drones. "There were ways to keep an eye on things, to see the whole site, the building itself, and its details in a way that would have never been possible to walk through," Winka added.

She also highlighted that the park was one of the first projects in China that was actually coordinated on all levels by 3D BIM modeling. "The architects, engineers, contractors, landscapers, and subcontractors and we were all in the same model…It really changes the dynamic."

The park has already been completed and opened to public.