Luhe Cultural City, China

Luxury resort nearby Lake Jinniu

Keppie attended a meeting in the offices of the Luhe District Government in May 2010, primarily to present our initial thoughts on their requirement for a luxury resort hotel on the shores of nearby Lake Jinniu, a project introduced to the practice during an international trade conference in London.

At this meeting we were given the brief and feasibility study for a project titled “Luhe Cultural City”; a development of 5 buildings within a site area of 150,000 sqm comprising theatre, museum, culture centre, library and urban museum together with 20,000 sqm support facilities all totalling 72,000 sqm. As the Government were unhappy with both designs in the feasibility study, we were asked to new conceptual approach.

The site will be the first phase of a wider masterplanned expansion of the town of Luhe towards the Chu River; a distributer of the Yangtze. This masterplan is only at infrastructure level of detail and weighs heavily on the reclamation of the river’s edge as an amenity to the town. The Cultural City project will be the first major proposal developed from the masterplan.