"We cannot continue designing cities and buildings as if nothing had happened," says Vicente Guallart Furio, founder of Guallart Architects, Member of the International Council of the Asia Pacific Designer Federation (APDF).

As early as 2015, Vicente had an in-depth discussion with Mr. He Changcheng, chairman of APDF, on "urban design and innovation in the information age" at APDF Urban Connection Creative Forum. The hitherto unknown impact of COVID-19's surprise attack on our world in 2019. In the post-2020 epidemic era, we should think more about how to build ecologically sustainable and self-sufficient cities.

Guallart Architects has won the international competition for the design of a mixed-use community in Xiong'an, China, defining an urban model that merges the traditional European urban blocks, the Chinese modern towers, and the productive farming landscape.

The four blocks, that will be built using mass timber and passive design solutions will have a mix-use program including apartments, residences for young and old people, offices, swimming pools, shops, food markets, kindergarten, an administrative center, and a fire station among other facilities.

All buildings will be covered by greenhouses that will allow them to produce food for daily consumption and use their sloping roofs to produce energy. In the ground floor, small co-working digital factories will allow to use 3D printer and rapid prototyping machines to produce object for the daily use. So the building will have an internal metabolic system that will integrate energy production, recycled water, food production and material reuse promoting a distributed model for urban management.

At the 11th Global Architecture Masters Forum in 2021, Vicent, as a special guest speaker, brought us a wonderful speech of "self-sufficient ecological design" by means of remote connection. We can look at China's eco cities from such a new perspective: cities will emit carbon dioxide, but local forests will absorb carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. Cities can provide food and renewable energy locally, or they can use local wood or bamboo for construction. We have four blocks. We should not only build apartments and residential buildings here, but also consider the living environment of different scales, including our residence, a single building, the whole block and even our relationship with the whole city. Modern blocks and green building elements are integrated to create a new model of ecological city.

In addition, in the face of the epidemic, we will also adapt to how to work at home or near home, so the buildings we design will allow people to work and study at home, which may become the norm of life in the future. We have set up a shared office space. People may only go to the office for one or two days a week, and work in the shared office space close to home at other times.

At the leaders' climate summit, President Xi Jinping said: China will make very fruitful promises on tackling climate change and achieve "carbon neutralization" in 2060. Now, what we need to do is to translate these policy objectives into specific project.

Via Guallart Architects