The KINCANG Egrets Waves Residence project is located in Keqiao, Shaoxing, on the banks of the World Cultural Heritage Grand Canal. The integration of Zero One City designs its planning and architecture. The project aims to build a high-end modern residential product for Shaoxing and maximize the use of the canal landscape, integrating the culture, nature, and contemporary style of the ancient city of Shaoxing, showcasing an ecological, lightweight, and comfortable lifestyle, and making new explorations for the design of residential areas in China.
The overall layout of the project is layered from low-density to high-density areas. The project provides 22 apartment layouts ranging from approximately 128 to 670 square meters, including villas, townhouses, row houses, and other improved products. The design is refined according to various landscape locations, such as along and overlooking the lake.
The project adopts a transparent design and uses floor-to-ceiling glass more than twice the size of conventional glass, enjoying an excellent view of nature. The planning and design adopted the classic public space layout strategy of adding multiple auxiliary axes to the main axis, and various health facilities were arranged around it.
The architectural design inspiration comes from the white egret taking off on the Xiao-shao Canal—the facade design extracts stretching line elements from concrete forms, forming a systematic modeling language.
Design to depict the soothing flow of water by establishing a horizontal order. The continuous aluminum panel eaves provide floor-to-ceiling glass to shield against wind, rain, and scorching sun, forming a space under the eaves similar to traditional Chinese architecture. The organic combination of plan and facade forms a concave-convex architectural form, and the design also uses many curved surfaces to enhance the overall sense of fluidity and softness, making the facade form smoother and bringing excellent views to the interior.
The diversified product configurations have brought about 30 types of architectural units, each of which has undergone dozens of drafts of styling refinement. High-rise residential buildings use champagne as the main color scheme, with light and transparent full-floor glass and many continuous balconies providing open views. A simple silver-white color tone dominates the stacked design, continuing the design language of "curves," the overall shape is more concise and pure: A standalone building with nature as its boundary, surrounded by a courtyard that wraps around the building. The design outlines the building with silver curves, and the stacked eaves look like ripples from the air.
The large-scale application of non-standard materials, such as oversized components and hyperbolic aluminum plates, in residential design is relatively rare in China. The project has brought huge challenges to the team regarding quality and cost control.
The design team sorted out the components through modular control: different materials, such as glass railings, handrails, aluminum plates, etc., were designed with staggered joints. The glass balustrades were divided into 1.5m intervals, and one glass balustrade corresponded to one aluminum plate for standardized design. The curved glass's curved plate and chamfer size were unified, and the curved cantilever plate was further disassembled into modular components such as edge profiles, upper slopes, lower slopes, and curved corners.
