Longhua Airport operated for 80 years until 2011 and was the city’s only civilian airport till 1949. This green notch in the city is just as jarring to the surrounding urban fabric as the original swipe of gray concrete runway had been in midcentury Shanghai. And there’s a diverse array of programs and ecologies across the site: a wetland boardwalk, a lawn, a bird-watching grove, a butterfly garden, and a sunken garden that doubles as an events venue. Topographic rises break up the monotony of the park and visually edit out scaleless, flat expanses. These pathways are separated by planted allées, including the Trident Maple, a signature tree in the park, selected because of its colorful fall foliage, generous canopy, acclimation to Shanghai, and tricornered, aeronautical-shaped leaves. The park does this with linear circulation routes that echo the form of the park itself with a seven-lane road as well as bike and pedestrian paths. Starting from a daunting imperial axis, the landscape architects had to make sure their design cut the “original scale down to miscellaneous linear spaces,” says Zhang. Rows of plantings, sunken gardens, and trails provide spatial diversity and advance certain ecological aims in the riparian area. He calls the runway “an amazing datum that collides through the landscape.” In keeping with the airport form, Xuhui Runway Park is intensely linear and contains details that recall the site’s former life, such as uplit railings echoing airfield illumination. “Because it was an airport runway, we felt the sense of movement was very critical to that space,” says Mark Dawson, a principal in Sasaki’s Boston office. Original direction-marker supergraphics are preserved, and damaged sections of the landing strip became cobblestone patterns along pedestrian paths. Inground lights outline the reused 11-foot concrete airstrip panels, providing a visual connection to the site’s past life and making the former 2,001-yard-long, 87-yard-wide tarmac unmistakable.
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