The city of Jinzhou is located 430 kilometers north of Beijing in the province of Liaoning and lies 20 kilometers inland. The Jinzhou Longqiwan New Area is an urban development on the coast of the Bonzai Sea. Part of this development is a park, for which Bureau B+B is building a ‘fierljep’ polder and an information centre. This polder-garden will open during the Jinzhou World Landscape Art Exposition in 2013. More images and architects’ description after the break.
A three-meter high dike surrounds the garden and protects the meadows and the system of ditches. The polder is vacant, devoid of views and stands in sharp contrast to the other gardens. But before you know it, the polder becomes a playground. Visitors, fathers, and children use canes to vault over the ditches from one field to another. They experience the euphoria of taking possession of inaccessible land and, by using the canes to transport themselves throughout the garden, follow the more than thousand year old tradition of ‘fierljeppen’. This spectacle can be seen from the dike: how an empty polder is transformed into a playground with leaping and laughing people.
