SanYa
Mangrove Tree
Hotel
"I seek something that is much more than just modern building. I want something cultural, traditional and inspirational. Hotel today are just filled with modernistic simplisitic taste and lost the essence of traditonal culture. China need something, and I hope you guys can create something like that."
- Mr. Wang (Top Executive of the JinMao Tower of Shanghai)
How it Began and Design Philosophy
The SanYa Mangrove Tree Hotel is a project that was inspired through a lunch conversation with the top executive Mr. Wang of the JinMao Tower in Shanghai. During that dinner, he express his dissatisfaction with the similarity of hotels across SanYa, in which most of them looks and feels the same. He requested something that is better and 'traditionally Chinese'. Of 2014 summer, this project was taken into action by our team with the core philosophy of 'reserving nature and creating culture'. We hand-picked a location that exists in SanYa island that is near the mangrove tree location. We decided that we will preserve this natural reservation by placing our architecture on top of it. We also seek an open area near the tree reservation to build our most top and confident main hotel building to keep most of the hotel clients.
About this Project
This projected took us an approximate of 10 month to finish. Each hotel room and region is filled with details. Every single aspect of our work and thoughts were placed into this project to make it as realistic as possible. The hotel is composed of main hotel area, back garden, and the mangrove tree resort.
Thoughts
This project made us more aware of our own culture and its danger into extinction. We often seek the more simple and fundamental way of making architecture in modern times that we slowly and are unaware that we are killing what is left to us from our ancestors more than thousands of years ago. The Mangrove Tree Hotel was something of a beginning, but also something that symbolically means a path of revival for an old and ancient culture.