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| (Photo/China Daily) |
An abandoned quarry in Shanghai has been transformed into an award-winning park that celebrates its industrial past. Zhang Yue reveals the people and history behind the huge project.
Zhang Derong, 58, stands on the spot where his old home once stood, where he lived most of his life, and looks out over a quarry garden in Shanghai. "I don't recognize it at all," he says. The only remnant of the past is a 60-meter deep quarry that is now a landscaped feature of Chenshan Botanical Garden in Songjiang district. "It's such a tranquil and beautiful place now," he says, "and it's fantastic that the years of noise and danger caused by mining have simply faded away."
The quarry garden is an approximately two-hour drive from downtown Shanghai and opened up to the public just before the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
An iron and steel bridge leads visitors from the quarry's top down to the lakeside 30 meters below. Gao Erqiang / China Daily
Over the past three years it has come to international attention, winning a British Association of Landscape Industries award in 2011. The following year the American Society of Landscape Architects honored the park for being innovative and "restoring the ecology of the quarry, creating a natural and cultural experience in an Oriental style".
"It was my most challenging project ever," says professor Zhu Yufan from the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, who led the design and reconstruction efforts, costing 32.84 million yuan ($5.3 million) over three years. "But I am so glad that we did it. It was totally worth the effort."
The quarry site on the south side of Chenshan Hill had been mined for decades and its igneous rock was used to build the foundations of Shanghai, its roads and buildings. The quarry was closed in the 1980s and the site lay barren, while the quarry itself filled with water.
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