A factory in the city. The accelerated urban development in China is challenging the models of large-scale infrastructure and industry traditionally relegated to the countryside. Tianjin Rockcheck steel factory is located in the middle of the two growing urban cores of Tianjin: the historic city and the new development of Binhai. The current factory is a black box, isolated from its surrounding urban and ecological systems, urging a change of model to prevent relocation. The city is knocking on a door until now closed.

Opening the black box. Three interventions to weave the internal ecology of the factory with that of its context:

A continuous landscape. The green loop connects the permeable grounds inside the factory with the parks in the south and north of the factory, a system of brownfield remediation gardens and stormwater management strategies with phytoremediation processes clean the water before pouring it to the exterior ditches.

An educational factory. The red loop follows an elevated walkway protecting the visitor along the steelmaking process, making it visible. It grows to host new programs (café and tourism facilities) and provide new points of view of the factory as a whole (observation towers).

A performative interface. The steel park is a space of dialog within the factory and the city. The metabolism of the steelmaking process is exported to 9 programmatic pavilions distributed along the park. This influx of hot water, gas, and material slag is injected in the context of each pavilion, creating a continuous gradient in the stripes separating the sequence of programs.

The park is a journey interweaving the harmonic flows of humans and energy: the leftover gas is used in pneumatic canopies along the park that inflate and deflate reflecting the periodic timing of the processes inside the factory; heat and water is sprayed along the park to form clouds of mist and(or) heat that appear and disappear, inviting the user to continue moving; the stormwater management generates a playful landscape articulated with the topography of the park, guiding cleaning and using the water until poured to the reservoir in the west; the slag and material leftover is used to fill these topographies, to build the vegetation beds of the reservoir wetlands and to create sculptures and landscape features growing in time.

(open) factory let the nature through the box, let the city enter the box and let the box out of the box. It is a celebration of the steelmaking industry potential to become an educational example of environmental protection, of collaboration and transparency and an important player promoting values and initiatives to engage with local communities.