The quarry that built modern Beijing gets a surprising second life

On the northern outskirts of Beijing, massive holes in the earth bear the scars of what it’s taken to fuel the Chinese capital’s growth into a sprawling megacity that more than 22 million people call home.

The site was a quarry that from 1990 to 2015 provided the raw material to help Beijing grow at hyperspeed, supplying everything from skyscrapers to roads to the main stadium built for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Last operated by Beijing Xingfa Cement Co., its closure left behind a negative space that is the inverse of the vertical urbanity of Beijing. Now, after nearly a decade of planning and design, the quarry’s rehabilitation into a striking and surreal 265-acre park is complete.

The park was designed by the global landscape architecture and design firm SWA, which also led the landscape architecture and planning that’s turned the quarry’s factory and administrative buildings into a national science research campus. The highly complex remediation of the quarry is restoring life to the land and soil while using its unique physicality to create an unexpected destination. As a whole, it’s a remarkable second turn for a swath of land that has been all but drained of its resources.

“We needed to create an ecological base. But on top of that, we also wanted to bring people back into this park,” says Jack Wu, managing principal of SWA’s Shanghai studio and design lead for the quarry park and broader campus. “Although it was originally a mining place, we feel like these two things can kind of coexist.”

The park that’s resulted from nearly a decade of planning is part landscape repair, part land art. The unavoidable scars of the quarry’s two crater-like pits have been reframed as performative elements. One pit serves as a seasonal lake that captures water from across the site in a carefully coordinated drainage system engineered to handle the summer deluges that can cause flooding in the region. The other pit serves a more scenic role, with shaded overlooks at its rim, an amphitheater, and walking paths carved through its terraced cliffside.

In a unique design move, the extractive processes that cut this landscape into a pixelated cavity are not hidden away but rather emphasized, centering the raw, destructive nature of the quarry’s past life into a landscape experience. SWA collected large stones and boulders from across the site to create sculpture-esque mounds and landforms reminiscent of its days as an active quarry.

Abandoned machinery and mining vehicles have also been integrated into the landscape. “We feel like it’s very important and very interesting to just keep them, to remind people about the history of the original site,” Wu says.

The project also aims to counteract some of the quarry’s terrestrial reengineering by using its vast holes and cuts to move water through the site. The planting was designed to manage how water absorbs into the ground while also filtering the modest contamination and heavy metals that remain in the upper levels of the soil. It also controls how water moves past the park’s edges without flooding nearby villages or spreading the contaminants the park itself is working to clean.

“We really want to keep all the water on-site so that we can prevent it from further eroding the edges of the pits, but also so that we can keep that water to use for irrigation,” says Peichen Hao, an associate principal at SWA.

The designers used raw materials from the site to re-create some of the terracing and land formations common to quarries, turning the stones into building materials for walkways, staircases, and the sculpted forms that mimic the look and feel of common open-pit mines.

The biggest design move, though, may be simply letting the disturbed landscape reveal itself. The designers developed methods to preserve the cratered hillsides and carved-up cliffs of the quarry pits, keeping them on display as relics of the industrial past while also celebrating their massive scale.

Wu says the site has such a strong connection to Beijing and its development that he hopes it lures visitors from the city to better understand that link. Even without that deeper context, he expects the site to be a draw for its grandness alone.

“As a city boy, you don’t really experience these big mountains, a giant pit, the scale difference,” Wu says. “We didn’t want to add brand-new things, to make it feel like it’s an urban park. We still want to keep the authentic industrial feeling of it.”

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