XISUI Design’s Playground Reinvents Playtime with 3D Concrete Printing
A 13,000m² community park in Jinan, China, integrates children's play areas with water features and natural landscapes.
- Project: Boulder Park
- Location: Jinan,
- China
- Architects:
- XISUI Design
- Typology:
- Recreational Architecture
- Site Area: 4,000㎡ （children’s area only）
- Images Credit: Hu Yihao, XISUI Design: Zhou Sheng, CHENIN Visual
Designed by XISUI Design, the Boulder Park is a 13,000m² community park, that incorporates large boulders, symbolizing eternity. These natural elements are woven into the park’s functions and experiences: some rest atop sandpits as climbing structures, others shape the creek into playful water features, while a vast cave-like adventure space is realized through advanced 3D-printed concrete technology.
Designed by XISUI Design, the park merges children’s play with water features and natural landscapes, encouraging intergenerational interaction and community engagement.
XISUI Design focused on the children’s activity zones: the All-Age Boulder Playground, Water Garden, and Forest Garden. These areas integrate swings, slides, seesaws, trampolines, rocking horses, merry-go-rounds, climbing tunnels, speaking tubes, and rope structures directly into stone formations and concrete caves. The All-Age Boulder Playground & Forest Garden’s design encourages both fun and physical development, strength, balance, coordination, while stimulating children’s cognitive engagement with nature.
Located to the west of the All-Age Boulder Playground, the Water Garden features an outdoor water play area with babbling shallow streams, blending naturally into the surrounding landscape. The design team at XISUI Design focused on creating interactive water play experiences suitable for all ages. Children can engage with fountains, feel the flow of water, and explore jumping springs, winding creeks, and a water turntable – each designed to engage children and stimulate curiosity. Water pumps and pressure devices add to the experience, providing opportunities for exploration and learning. This interactive environment fosters a connection between children and nature, allowing them to engage with water and feel its gentle power firsthand.
The standout feature of the park’s installations is its use of advanced construction technology – 3D concrete printing. This additive manufacturing method produces monolithic structures with complex, free-form curved shapes based on digital models. Such shapes are challenging to achieve through traditional formwork. 3D concrete printing uses a computer-controlled robotic arm that precisely extrudes liquid or semi-solid concrete, which then solidifies, building the structure layer by layer. The essence combines digital design and material science, offering
3D concrete printing uses a computer-controlled robotic arm that precisely extrudes liquid or semi-solid concrete, which then solidifies, building the structure layer by layer. The essence combines digital design and material science, offering unprecedented freedom and complexity in spatial design and construction. The resulting layered rock textures create distinctive surface textures that visually resemble the natural rock formations of boulders and caves. Moreover, its advantage of forming organic shapes at once improves both the spatial accuracy and user experience.
“Landscape structures and installations are often small in scale, with low load requirements and simple, clear functional needs. In the application of 3D-printed concrete technology, compared to architecture, landscape projects may have even more diverse usage scenarios. Although the current 3D concrete materials still face a series of challenges, such as uneven stress distribution and relatively simple reinforcement methods, the 3D printing materials used in Boulder Park have an average strength of 50MPA, surpassing the traditional C40 concrete strength standard.” explains Hu Yihao, Lead Designer.
