Archinect - News

Hong Kong's legendary Jumbo Floating Restaurant capsizes in the South China Sea

2022-06-23T13:48:00-04:00

Hong Kong's iconic Jumbo Floating Restaurant has capsized in the South China Sea less than a week after it was towed away from the city, its parent company said Monday. The restaurant was towed away last Tuesday. The company said it planned to move it to a lower-cost site where maintenance could be carried out. It said that prior to its departure, the vessel had been thoroughly inspected by marine engineers and hoardings were installed, and all relevant approvals were obtained.

The Wes Anderson-like former fine-dining establishment served some rather well-regarded Cantonese cuisine to diners for more than forty years before being closed and decommissioned earlier this month following the Covid-caused economic downturn of 2020. The three-story vessel reportedly went down in heavy seas near the disputed Parcel Islands chain last week while in the process of being towed to an undisclosed “lower cost site,” according to Aberdeen Restaurant Enterprises, the management group responsible for the remaining entity.

Hong Kong’s provisional government had been working on “the rebirth of the floating restaurant” before the sinking, but will now have to shift focus to other preservation efforts as the Jumbo reportedly went down in a spot of ocean more than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) deep.

Büro Ole Scheeren's new Sanya Horizons resort offers itself as a tropical oasis on the coast

2022-03-25T17:38:00-04:00

One of South China’s most coveted vacation destinations is about to get a spur thanks to a new design from Büro Ole Scheeren.

Billed as an enhancement of the natural surroundings on Hainan Island, Sanya Horizons will stand 160 meters (525 feet) above the resort-dotted tropical coastline to offer itself as what the firm says is a “unique ecological leisure destination” on a massive 83,500-square-meter (898,786-square-foot) beachfront plot.

Image © Büro Ole Scheeren

The project will combine two hotels — the Regent Sanya Bay and Hotel Indigo Sanya Bay — into one development, with each arranged in a stack that frees up much of the space surrounding the structure for an even more enhancing program of natural gardens and swimming areas. The combination of the massing also creates a unique and memorable curvilinear form that is both more structurally and ecologically efficient. Scheeren described the cumulative effect as “the merging of architecture and nature into a space of synergetic ha...

A new Foster + Partners-designed university campus opens in Shenzhen

2016-11-01T13:06:00-04:00

On the eastern edge of Shenzhen, a new university campus designed by Foster + Partners just opened. The China Resources University, a 55,000 sq. meter project, is part of a larger mixed-used development headed by the London-headquartered firm.

According the press release, the campus sits on a hill with sweeping views of the South China Sea. Five teaching buildings and an “innovation centre” line a central boulevard leading to a main auditorium building that contains a large lecture hall. The campus also includes a library, more auditoria, a bar, gym, and student residences.

“The idea was to create a cascading complex of buildings and spaces - a series of teaching and living spaces, terraces and informal streets that encourage interaction and a sense of wellbeing,” states Chris Bubb, a partner at Foster + Partners.

The buildings share a palette of materials: fair-faced concrete, bronze-colored cladding, and clay brick. The clay bricks are one of the signature design elements of the proj...

Despite recent territorial disputes over the South China Sea, a Chinese company has been awarded a major contract to build artificial islands off the coast of the Philippines

2016-11-01T12:41:00-04:00

Located on the eastern edge of the body of water commonly referred to in English as the South China Sea, the Philippines is among the countries that dispute China’s claim to the area and its islands. Earlier this year, a Hague-based tribunal, constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, ruled that China has no historical claim or sovereign rights to the islands in a case brought by the Philippines against the People’s Republic of China.

But the Philippines, under the leadership of the controversial President Rodrigo Duterte, has pivoted away from its relationship with the United States and towards China. Now, following a state visit by Duterte to Beijing, a state-owned Chinese company named CCCC Dredging has received a major contract to build the Philippines its own artificial islands.

As reported by the state-owned Chinese paper People’s Daily, the Philippines will gain four artificial islands off the coast of Davao City—incidentally where Duterte served as ...

Diller Scofidio + Renfro win $1.3 billion 'Pearl Eco-Island' competition in the South China Sea

2016-09-02T13:28:00-04:00

The South Sea Pearl Eco-Island development is funded by HNA Group and will include houses, hotels, a cruise ship port, yacht harbour, spa and theme park. [...] The jury said the “singular and clear” design would “create a beautiful, iconic form rising naturally out the landscape, recalling the volcanic caldera of the area, and shape the island into a continuous structure that would be an extremely efficient compaction of resort, retail, and housing."

The "eco" stands for... well, it depends. To HNA Group: “This proposal is one for a truly a human-made island that celebrates all that makes such water-bound places so attractive and beautiful, while contributing to our understanding of deep, intrinsic ecology.” To the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, these manmade islands are an explicit move by China to exert sovereignty (a status that The Hague explicitly rejects), and they're causing massive environmental harm.

Investigating China's role in the South China Sea this past July, "The tribunal clearly decided that China had caused severe harm to the coral reef environment," according to Kent Carpenter, the tribunal's expert witness and a professor of biological science. Much of that damage was attributed to island building. You can find more on their proceedings here.

Runners up to the competition include Foster + Partners and Morphosis.

China plans to build an underwater "space station" in the South China Sea

2016-06-15T19:35:00-04:00

China is speeding up efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters. Such an oceanic “space station” would be located as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface, according to a recent Science Ministry presentation viewed by Bloomberg.

For more news from the South China Sea, check out these links:

China plans to build a fleet of floating nuclear power plants

2016-04-25T15:15:00-04:00

All the radar systems, lighthouses, barracks, ports and airfields that China has set up on its newly built island chain in the South China Sea require tremendous amounts of electricity, which is hard to come by in a place hundreds of miles from the country’s power grid. Beijing may have come up with a solution: floating nuclear power plants. A state-owned company, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, is planning to build a fleet of the vessels to provide electricity to remote locations [...]

Previously in the Archinect news:

New satellite images show progress in China's island-building project

2015-07-01T14:19:00-04:00

New satellite imagery of remote islands in the South China Sea shows several Chinese island-building projects are finished. In five of seven island projects, attention has turned to the next phase: building bases with potential military uses on the islands.

Taking a cue from the Gulf states, China has been engaged in a massive island-building project in the South China Sea. New images from the Washington Post show the staggering progress that is being made, with the first buildings cropping up. While relatively small, the South China Sea is one of the most important shipping channels in the world – and may also hold a massive reserve of oil and gas deposits. Control of the waterway has become a source of increasing geopolitical tension in the region and internationally, with the United States and other countries asking China to cease island-building operations. But according to the Chinese, the artificial islands are a legal expression of their sovereignty.

While artificial islands may seem incredibly modern – if not downright sci-fi – there's evidence that humans have been doing it for some time now. The massive Aztec city of Tenochtitlan largely consisted of artificial islands, or chinamitl, surrounding a smaller natural island in Lak...

China is busy building islands in the South China Sea

2014-09-08T21:18:00-04:00

But I’ve seen aerial photographs of this place taken by the Philippine navy. They show the massive land reclamation work China has been doing here since January. Millions of tonnes of rock and sand have been dredged up from the sea floor and pumped into the reef to form new land.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes travels to the South China Sea, where the Chinese state is building islands.