“The master plan of 2009 World Games Park is a long range site planning of the 100 hectare national sport park, driven by three landscape ecological concepts: landscape as picture, landscape as flow and landscape as process, “ said Yang. “The design criteria of the Main Stadium were also set in the master plan, which required its architecture to perform both functionally for sport events and ecologically for the environment.”

The result was the first solar-powered stadium in Taiwan designed by Toyo Ito, an influential Japanese architect.

Yang collaborated with MAA, COX and Peter Droege to submit the winning entry in a 2004 competition for the Kaohsiung 2009 World Games Park master plan. The group’s work bested Mott MacDonald Ltd., ARUP, Richard Rogers Partnership, Jones Lang LaSalle and other, local firms.

The Park is in the Tsoying District of the northern Kaohsiung and is surrounded by complicated hybrid landscapes of nature, city and infrastructure. The master plan shows that the contemporary urban sport park is not simply a traditional urban park that provides recreational and sport functions to individual citizens. It is also a public space for social events and sport competitions. The ecological function of Kaohsiung World Games Park goes beyond a green spot surrounded by intensive built-up urban environment. It is a strategic point in a landscape ecological network of the region, which contributes to Kaohsiung’s construction of city-wide ecological corridors. The proposed Kaohsiung solar stadium that accommodates 40,000 permanent and 15,000 temporary seats becomes an iconic landmark and activity powerhouse of the park and the city. The design is treated as a strategic planning and process design, rather than as a static landscape form. The large-scale urban environment contains a time dimension and is to be transformed over time through micro-scale actions and incremental processes.

Read CNN's coverage of the 2009 World Games.

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