2018-12-24

Haskoll Winter Olympics and Ski Resort Projects

This year Beijing celebrates it’s 10 year anniversary of the Olympic games of 2008. Now 10 years later Beijing and China are preparing to welcome the world once again for the Winter Olympics in 2022. This will be the first time China has ever hosted the Winter Games and Haskoll are fortunate to work on the commercial service development for the games.

The venue will be spread out over 3 locations, Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou. Beijing will utilize many of the buildings that were constructed for the 2008 games while much of the ski events will take place outside of the city. While the mountain region to the North West of Beijing is already an established ski resort more than half of the buildings will be built for the games and in keeping with the sustainability goals of the winning bid, all these buildings will designed to be retained after the game has finished. Like the 2008 games, new infrastructure will be built including a new high-speed rail line between Beijing and Zhangjiakou reducing the current travel time of 3 hours to just 50 minutes.

Accommodation will be a big requirement of the development opportunities, there are currently only 550 hotel rooms within an area of 10km to the Zhangjiakou site. Haskoll’s resort and master planning experience has been utilized in one of the largest mixed-use and hotel complex projects in the area, Chongli Snow town just outside of the main Olympic hub of Zhangjiakou. Combining 6 hotels a mall and theatre. The project is due for completion before the game and will provide much needed facilities during the games and afterward help the area to build its reputation as world famous Winter resort. 

The style of the new village is intended to reflect a European mountain town you might find in the hills of Austria or Switzerland.

The main internal corridor links all the hotels and is heavily themed as an old train station concourse to bring warmth and interest in contrast to the cold conditions outside.

This is not the first time Haskoll has experienced building in cold climates. One of the exciting things about working across China from the hot temperature of Sanya to the icy conditions of Harbin is that each project needs to be considered carefully to how it operates and how the design responds to the climate.

Such an example is our Hotel on Harbin for Wanda Vista. A landmark hotel and resort building in the heart of the city. Famous for its yearly ice festival Harbin is a major destination for those brave enough to face the extreme temperatures.

Our concept for the building naturally, therefore, was to look at a block of ice, the tower represents this and then the podium becomes more fluid as the ice begins to melt, giving the impression of the then finally forming the lake below.

When designing the tower we wanted to express this ‘ice block’ concept in the edges and corners with subtle curves to mimic ice. This presented us with a technical challenge of designing each cladding panel differently yet making the number of types economic for construction. Using parametric modelling techniques we were able to give the contractor direct sizes for each panel for fabrication and meet the budget.

Nearby in Changchun we are in the early stage of our Lotus Mountain project located in Jingyue Shuangyang International Leisure Holiday Tourism area. Currently, in the master planning stage, this year-round resort will take advantage of the North East climate to create a themed resort destination including ecology park, holiday village, film theme street and of course a ski resort.

We also have an upcoming project for Gongyi in Qinglongshan mountain for a year-round hot spring resort that will cater to guests all-year-round including Winter time by allowing guests to still enjoy an outdoor swim in the freezing temperatures!

While we are in the winter mood, we at Haskoll wanted to finish by taking this opportunity to wish all of our friends a very Merry Christmas!