Service Station in Suzhou Creek

The Service Station in Front of Putuo Park is one of the three citizen service stations which were first constructed for demonstration in the Project on Public Space Connection of Both Banks of Suzhou Creek, Putuo Section.

The Yaoshuilong (Chemical Lane) Peninsula across the river from Putuo Park was once one of the famous shanty towns where industrial workers lived in early Shanghai.

It is adjacent to the elevated light rail line transformed from the Shanghai-Hangzhou Railway to the north, and its southeast main gate opens to West Guangfu Road and is close to the north end of Yaoshuilong Bend of Suzhou Creek.

The main gate retreats from the road, and forms a small park front open area with the walls of the residential quarters on both sides.

It is mostly shaded with few people staying there. The service station in front of Putuo Park is aimed to explore how to revitalize urban space resources in the context of urban renewal.

With the site of the service station as a link, the riverside greenbelt of Suzhou Creek and Putuo Park are connected to improve the environmental quality and space vitality, as well as shape the daily public space friendly towards the community.

We adopt a manual charging and componentized spatial configuration method. We regard the different functional spaces that constitute the service station, such as toilets, lounges, showrooms, small gardens, eaves galleries, etc.

as relatively standard spatial components and modules of different specifications, and the way of assembly of components is adjusted and customized according to site conditions.

People can either walk through or take a rest under the west porch next to the flower bed. This cloister has also become a core space of the entire station.

The lounge and the west and south sides of the showroom are surrounded by eaves galleries, and between them, there is a long and narrow courtyard garden, shaded by trees and rocks, called "Puyuan Garden".

The service station also presents a continuous open horizontal eaves gallery to the road, and the rooms rise from behind the eaves gallery. The original park lodge on the north side between the entrance cloister and the lounge has also been renovated and connected with the service station.

The north side of the showroom is combined with reserved trees to form a small quiet backyard garden, and the surrounding wall is lined with a green plant wall as the background.

As the flood control wall along the river is high, the view from the ground floor is obstructed, a roof garden is set on the lounge and showroom, which is reached by an outdoor steel ladder on the east side of the backyard close to the fence, and two roofs are connected by a small sky bridge over Puyuan Garden.

Under the shade of the nearby tree canopy, people will find panoramic river bends all in sight on the riverbank.

Also, we maintained continuous flower beds on the west and south sides and optimized the planting. As a result, the original site character of being basically covered by the shade of trees continues.

The slender round steel columns of the cloister and eaves galleries are misaligned inside and outside, thus forming the characteristic rhythmic continuous cross-skew beams of the corridor roof.

The other side is relatively slender round columns which maintain a similar structural scale to eaves columns.

The solid exterior walls of the lounge and showroom are covered with anodized aluminum slabs, and the exterior walls of the park lodge and toilets are covered with deep carbonized anti-corrosion SYP timber panels.