Wuhan Snow World

CLOU Architects

Short description

Promoted by the Beijing Winter Olympics, snow sports have become a popular leisure activity among the younger generations of China. Sunac has been pioneering the field of leisure and sports entertainment and is already offering its fifth generation of comprehensive indoor snow sports experiences. Combining the actual sports facilities with hotels, retail, theme parks and other entertainment amenities, and complementing them with ski schools, ski clubs, and professional sports events, the Snow Worlds of Harbin, Guangzhou, and Chengdu has already attracted more than 5 million visitors, making them some of the most popular sports leisure destinations in China since their opening. Their professional approach has further established them as a training ground for both domestic and international skiers.
CLOU collaborates with Wuhan Urban Construction Group and Sunac, directs its innovative design approach onto this new type of entertainment complex with a snow theme, expected to be completed in Wuhan，China.

A 24-hour leisure complex with a 500-meter downhill slope
Located in the Huangpi district adjacent to Mulan Ancient Town, Wuhan Snow World is set to be the new contemporary landmark of the area: a variety of entertainment, sports, and retail facilities groups around a central lake, to form a super-large commercial complex that promotes snow sports all-year-round.
In a well-composed combination of indoor winter sports, outdoor theme park playground, and connective retail street, Wuhan Snow Park appeals to the amusement appetite of one of the most populous cities in China, and sets precedent for a new type of all-inclusive entertainment.
Curated as a stage for 24-hour lakeside enjoyment, the masterplan arrays carnival vibes, indoor and outdoor shopping precincts, watersports and the abstracted vision of a mountain in the immersive experience of a singular super-sized complex where architecture and surfaces merge in complementary scales of terraced three-dimensional pixels.

Integrating sports with celebration, events and retail
Enclosing three different leisure experiences, three different building typologies of contrasting scale are unified in the framework of an integral design language: Indoor snow adventures are complemented by an extensive outdoor carnival landscape, as well as a variety of indoor and outdoor retail. A modular façade system through all components embraces collective elements that are then decomposed and re-organised in order to create identity in new synergies.

Indoor-outdoor Urban Public Space
Below the half-kilometre-long and 100 m high indoor ski slope with its pixelated multi-media façade, foothills full of sports and nightlife venues scatter towards the waterside, linking plazas and retail streets with generously landscaped areas and interactive facades.
Indoor spaces dissolve into the outdoors, to activate internal and external retail areas with entertainment facilities and landscapes, and to connect to the adjacent transportation nodes.

This ambitious milestone project is expected to be completed in 2024.