Time: 2005    Location: Tanshang

The Da Cheng Mountain is the cradle land of Tangshan . The government has decided to clean out all the industrial buildings on the hill foot to create an open green land for the city. Under the efforts of both Tangshan City Planning Bureau and URBANUS, this action has changed from beautifying the city as its primarily goal to renovating part of current industrial buildings into a museum park. URBANUS' scheme reserves four grain depots built during the Japanese occupying era and some surrounding warehouses as base structures for museum programs, such as Tangshan historical photography museum, folk art museum, shadow play museum, urban history museum, etc. In the daily life, even such an exuberated collection of city history and culture can hardly attract normal city residents. Therefore, a more lively antique trade market is designed to get people involved in the park program. In addition to some new shelters in interesting forms and materials, part of the structure of a pre-existing building is re-used to form a village-like market, drilled through by an old railroad.

As a newly rebuilt city after the great earthquake in 1976, Tangshan 's architecture is banal, dull, and lacking in history. Buildings like the grain depots in the park are ones of the few which sustained the great earthquake that destroyed almost everything. URBANUS' museum park program saves these historical structures from another wave of demolition by today's construction boom. The museum park's historical theme also can give the residents a deeper physical understanding of this city's history that has no physical traces now, and thereby triggers their affections towards this city.