BIG: Hualien Residences

Hualien is a rapidly developing city located in the middle portion of Taiwan’s East coast.

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 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.

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. 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.

Hualien Residences, Hualien, Taiwan
Program: residential complex
Architects: Bjarke Ingels Group
Collaborators: RJW, ARUP, Treegarden, Ken Sakamura
Partners-in-Charge: Bjarke Ingels, Jakob Lange, Finn Nørkjær
Project Manager: Andrew Lo
Design Architect: Cat Huang
Team: Eric Li, Anu Marjanna Leinonen, Jinho Lee, Kekoa Charlot, Alberto Herzog, Jaime Oliver Galienne, Horia Spirescu, Min Ter Lim, Junjie Yan, Dominic Black, Angelos Siampakoulis, Qianqian Ye, Emily King, Lucas Carriere, Miao Zhang, Ren Yang Tan, Andre Schmidt
Client: Taiwan Land Development Corporation
Area: 120,000 sqm
First residence completion: 2015