Taiwan saw mass development in many of its industrial towns some 40 years ago. As part of this a major shopping mall was built on the Tainan waterfront, southwest Taiwan. Over the years it became a deserted eyesore, but an ambitious plan has seen it reborn as an urban lagoon park. By Jared Green, Courtesy of ASLA.

Tainan, Taiwan. April 2020. In Tainan, a city of 1.8 million on the southwest coast of Taiwan, a defunct shopping mall has been transformed into Tainan Spring, an urban lagoon park. This ingenious new public space, which reuses remnants of the old mall’s concrete parking garage, is at the heart of an ambitious effort to bring people and nature back to the waterfront of Taiwan’s oldest city.

Commissioned by the urban development bureau of the Tainan city government, the new 581,000 square foot (54,000 m2) landscape forms a green axis along with a kilometre-long stretch of Haian Road that has been specifically redesigned for pedestrian use.

Tainan’s network of waterways have supported the city’s marine and fishing industries since as far back as the 17th century. But in 1983, the city began to over-develop its waterfront and as part of this the ChinaTown Mall was constructed on top of the old harbour, adjacent to the existing Tainan Canal. Decades later, as the shopping center was abandoned with the rise of online shopping and became a “drain on the vitality of downtown,” according to the city elders. As a consequence, the city developed plans to turn it into a destination park.

The city government required that the old mall be deconstructed and its concrete “meticulously recycled” given the large amounts of embodied carbon in its construction. The decision was also made to reuse a level of the underground parking garage as part of the structure of the proposed new sunken park.

The project designer MVRDV, a Dutch architecture and urban design firm, worked on the $4.7 million conversion with a multidisciplinary team including Taiwanese landscape design firm The Urbanists Collaborative.

The new park, called Tainan Spring, features existing concrete structures that have been mostly integrated with a new pedestrian promenade that loops around the park. Below the promenade, nooks have been formed that will soon be host small shops and restaurants for park users to patronise.

MVRDV says it wanted to create multiple layers to give a sense of history and place, and as part of this the curvilinear lagoon features pillars of the garage structure jutting out, creating a shopping mall-version of a Roman ruin.

“The redesign helps makes it perfect gathering spot for all seasons: the water level (in the pool) will rise and fall in response to the rainy and dry seasons, and in hot weather mist sprayers will reduce the local temperature to provide welcome relief to visitors, reducing the use of air conditioning in the summer months,” say the MVDRV designers.

The new design space also hosts playgrounds, gathering spaces, and a stage for performances, while the deconstruction of the building’s concrete frame has left a number of follies that can in due course be converted to shops, kiosks, and other amenities. Remnant structures also provide watery play spaces and shade; one part of the park contains a glass floor that offers a glimpse deep into the old infrastructural layers below. The lagoon is planted with multiple layers of plants and trees, which are expected to grow over the next few years into a stylised jungle. The plant life will eventually cool and shade gathering areas.

The team’s renovation of Haian Road will also reduce traffic to one lane in each direction. The new road uses pavers to create a uniform identity and incorporates more of the jungle plant palette. Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV added that “… in the history of the city, both the original jungle and the water were very important. Tainan is a very grey city (now), but with the reintroduction of the jungle to every place that was possible, the city is reintegrating into the surrounding landscape. We mixed local plant species so that they mimic the natural landscape east of Tainan. I think the city will benefit greatly from this.”

The project managers say that Tainan Spring shows what solutions are possible for unused shopping malls now that online shopping is supplanting physical stores, and central city lots are becoming redundant through changes in usage.

“People can bathe in the overgrown remains of a shopping mall,” said Maas. “Children can swim in the ruins of the past - how fantastic is that?”

Reprinted with permission from The Dirt, online magazine of ASLA

All images courtesy Tainan Spring/Daria Scagliola, MVRDV