Evolving From Moshe Safdie’s Pioneering Habitat, Golden Dream Bay Design Breaks Down Mega-Scale to Maximize Light and Outdoor Space in High-Density Residential Towers.

Safdie Architects announced that it won a competitive bid to design Golden Dream Bay, a residential and retail complex in Qinhuangdao, China, a city of 2.8 million located 300 km east of Beijing.
Building upon Moshe Safdie’s groundbreaking Habitat, the project offers a radical solution for quality, affordable housing in a heavily populated urban area. Golden Dream Bay provides much-needed housing for the city’s growing population while maximizing access to gardens and light at every level through the use of large-scale “windows” throughout the structure. Shared amenities and public spaces foster a sense of community among residents.

The site encompasses a total of 2 million square feet, with a total building area of 6 million square feet, including 2,200 residential units (3.5 million square feet), retail space (73,000 square feet), and recreational clubhouses (74,000 square feet). The project is slated for completion in 2014.
Conceived as a vital urban seafront community, Golden Dream Bay is organized around a beachfront boardwalk running north-south, and an east-west bazaar-like path lined with shops that connects the complex and neighboring communities to the beach area. The intersection of these two axes will foster year-round day and evening activity, with amenities for residents as well as the general public.
Townhouses line the property along the beachfront and high-rise towers rise from its center. Designed to create a garden-like environment with numerous public and private green spaces and ample sunlight, the towers are arranged to create large-scale “urban windows,” open spaces that break down the mega-scale of the project and frame views of the sea from the city beyond. The large spans needed to create these framed openings at both the mid- and roof-level will serve as recreational areas for residents. Swimming pools, sun decks, and other amenities at these levels are visible from many of the apartments, creating a resort-like ambiance and a feeling of community cohesiveness within the complex.

The design for Golden Dream Bay also draws on the firm’s acclaimed work in urban housing development, which began with Safdie’s Habitat, created for Expo ’67 in Montreal. Safdie has continued to evolve the original Habitat concept with Habitat of the Future—the culmination of two years of design research featured in the exhibition Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie, currently on view at the National Gallery of Canada—which offers new design strategies to address the growing density of today’s global cities.