A community built for people
Chinese project an inclusive, holistic model at edge of UNESCO site
An hour’s drive west of Shanghai, China stands Sangha — a 46-acre community built as a global model for diverse, holistic neighbourhoods.
Sangha includes everything from single-family homes and apartments, to hotels and wellness facilities. It was designed by Brooklyn-based architects Tsao McKown, in collaboration with the Shanghai-based developer Octave.
Located on Yangcheng Lake, on the edge of UNESCO world heritage site Suzhou, the 109single-family homes include three- to four-bedroom residences and two-bedroom townhomes. Eighty-seven village apartments (one, 1 1⁄2, twobedroom), can be purchased or rented, and many are created to accommodate disabled residents
As well, Sangha has two hotels: the One Hotel, a 72-room wellness retreat offering body treatments, Japanese-style hot springs, nutritionists, yoga teachers and fitness coaches. The Fellow Traveler Hotel is for those who wish to participate in the Life Learning Centre’s programs, located below in a 40,000-square-ft. facility.
Sangha also boasts an Early Childhood Learning Centre in a sunken quadrangle and surrounded by a food hall, markets, the hotels and town hall which acts as the heart of Sangha’s village activities. The Sanctuary is used for weddings, concerts and meditative assemblies.
Architects strived to “deflect attention away from design and back to nature,” with buildings, streets and pathways scaled to human needs and pedestrians’ strides.
Buildings have been situated to maximize air flow, passive solar heating and sun angles. Architects have integrated natural shading and ventilation into all buildings. Recycled building materials, wood, recycled stones and concrete have been used throughout the project.
Sangha, completed in 2017 for $300 million, took 10 years to design and build in collaboration with the Chinese government, non-profit and for-profit organizations in China, the U.S. and Singapore. Calvin Tsao, of Tsao & McKown Architects, in Brook- lyn, N.Y., answers a few questions about the community: How did Sangha come about?
My partner, Zack, and I believe the most important thing about any design is to create a holistic environment for whomever is there. We did an urban mass plan for Singapore and later one for Berlin — both with a private and public component to them. That’s when we realized the private sector and the government have to blend their agenda to make a proper society.
Being a Chinese-American I’ve been observing China for a long time. It’s evolved from a very backward place to a superior country both politically and economically. We started investigating how to create a sustainable, vibrant, culturally rich, socially healthy community in the rapidly growing, rapidly urbanizing, economically turbulent, politically complex culture that is China. Why does it have so many purposes?
We believe a properly built environment housing and serving the population is one of the important steps to a healthy environment.
We wanted a diversity of economic class and age groups in this community. We mostly want to show there are transient populations in the form of retreats and hotels, to rental apartments to service apartments.
Explain the health and wellness aspects.
We wanted to find a sustainable cultural and healthy environment, so we created this community focused on mindbody wellness.
We have the wellness retreat and the learning hotel — a series of life-learning programs with a housing component, which means you can stay for a week or a month. You can rent a room and go to school. That’s for what are called fellow travellers.
You describe Sangha as people-friendly. What does that involve?
We want to generate really great experiences for people, not only serving what they expect but giving them more than that. It’s friendly-plus. We did it by looking at the phenomena of human perception, movement, environmental integrity, psychological comfort.
We designed from how people perceive and how they use an emotional aspect of the space, as well as the functional aspect.