Hualien Residences

Hualien
Residences, designed by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, kick off sales with a complete
model unit on Taiwan’s East Coast. The 1000 m2 show home offers a glimpse into
the lifestyle and amenities of the development, including a new furniture line
designed exclusively for the Hualien Residences by KiBiSi.

Located
5 km south of Hualien City, the new Hualien Residences, totaling 120,000 m2,
are developed by Taiwan Land Development Corporation.
The project seeks to preserve and enhance the beauty of the surrounding nature
while creating a dense neighborhood of holiday homes that offer the future
residents an active and social lifestyle outside the city. The first phase is
expected to begin construction in 2016 and be completed by 2018.

BIG’s
design for the Hualien Residences evokes Taiwan’s spine of mountains to the
west, appearing like a stylized landscape of hills, valleys and canyons. The
floor plates are broken down into slim landscape stripes, covered by green
vegetation. The volumes are shifted to ensure that daylight and views reach
deep into the residences – and dip down to form lush pedestrian canyons and
shortcuts between the buildings.

“The
Hualien Hills are a pragmatic utopian attempt at rural densification where the
ecological qualities of nature aren’t consumed by the urban development, but
rather extended and amplified. Where the Spaniards found ways to drill homes
and cities into the porous rocks of the local mountains in Guadix, the
Taiwanese are now building cityscapes of inhabited hillsides in Hualien.”
Bjarke
Ingels, Founding Partner, BIG.

On
a backbone of efficient layouts and rational circulation, the undulating roofs
of the buildings provide the neighborhood with a great variation in residence
types and communal spaces. Inside, the apartments inherit attributes from the
angled silhouettes to add an almost traditional vernacular feeling of attics
and porches in the middle of the dense modern development. 

KiBiSi’s
exclusive furniture series compliments the architecture of the residences. A
collection of 8 different typologies is inspired by Scandinavian design and the
folding hill structure of the building. The series includes lounge seating
and sunbeds with corded welt edging that combines craft and comfort. This is
accompanied by a wooden dining table, LED lamp, drawer unit, coffee table and
technical shelf system with a flexible parallelogram construction that adapts
to the tilting wall angles of the building.

The landscape stripes run east-west to block
glare and thermal exposure from the low-angle morning and evening sun. The form
and orientation of the structure creates cool and comfortable microclimates at
the pedestrian level. The landscaped roofs further mitigate heat gain to
increase the comfort of the balconies and terraces, diminishing the energy
loads for cooling.