On the lush outskirts of Hong Kong, where the mountain meets the sea, GO PARK Sai Sha rises like a sculptural landscape shaped by wind and movement. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects in collaboration with Sun Hung Kai Properties, this 1.3-million-square-foot development is more than a sports center—it’s a civic ecosystem, part parkland, part retail village, and part social plaza. The design is bold yet deferential, embracing the site’s natural contours while quietly redefining how urban communities might move, gather, and play.
Where terrain becomes architecture
GO PARK Sai Sha does not sit on the land—it flows with it. Inspired by the region’s stepped mountain villages, the design replaces the traditional building silhouette with a network of terraces that seem to rise organically from the ground. These interlocking volumes are arranged along a continuous circulation ramp, gently leading visitors from lowland courts to elevated gardens, from shaded piazzas to rooftop viewpoints.
This spatial choreography results in what the architects call a “fabric landscape”—a structure woven into its environment rather than laid atop it. Instead of rigid zoning, the site offers a cascade of experiences that feel both cohesive and breathable. Visitors transition seamlessly between open-air fields, indoor amenities, and lush vegetated roofs, all while remaining in motion. Architecture becomes terrain; terrain becomes community.
A campus of sport, leisure, and life
The program of GO PARK Sai Sha is as dynamic as its form. Over one million square feet are devoted to outdoor recreation: football pitches, tennis and padel courts, climbing walls, running paths, and nature-based play zones. These are not enclosed fields but open invitations to explore—designed as much for families and weekend players as for athletic training.
Inside, a 300,000-square-foot complex houses a stadium with seating for 1,500, a fencing hall, a swimming academy, and retail pavilions. The boundaries between function and leisure blur: cafés border basketball courts, and pet-friendly lounges are just steps from the wellness center. This is a place where performance and relaxation coexist, where you can train like an athlete or simply stretch out in the sun.
The piazza as civic heart
At the center of the park lies its social engine: a spacious, open piazza ringed with dining terraces and shaded walkways. This is not a commercial plaza in the traditional sense—it’s a modern agora, designed to facilitate encounter and linger. Its porous edges allow movement in all directions, dissolving the typical axis of entry and exit. Elevated ramps offer balconies onto daily life; glazed façades invite the eye through to activity inside.
Ramps, bridges, and landscape corridors stitch the site together vertically, while multiple entrances maintain permeability at street level. Visitors don’t just pass through the site—they inhabit it. Public space here is not a leftover—it is the connective tissue, framed by architecture that emphasizes inclusion, exploration, and pause.
Built for continuity, shaped by community
Since its opening in early 2025, GO PARK Sai Sha has established itself as a daily ritual for thousands. It’s where schoolchildren race through after class, where early risers jog past yoga groups, where families meet for weekend games and neighbors exchange glances over iced coffees. The architecture supports this fluid use not by dictating behavior, but by offering possibility.
Simon Yu, director of Zaha Hadid Architects in Hong Kong, describes the project as “a social condenser, a platform for everyday life.” That ethos shows in every gesture—from the ample plantings to the careful scale of the staircases, from the way sunlight filters through concrete latticework to the soft integration of public seating. Each design choice amplifies one core idea: that civic spaces should be as alive as the people who use them.
GO PARK Sai Sha does not conform to typologies. It is neither a stadium nor a mall, neither park nor village—but something new in between. In its synthesis of movement and rest, nature and structure, spectacle and intimacy, it proposes a model for how 21st-century cities might reclaim joy, play, and connection through architecture that listens first, then acts. It is, simply, a park that works like a city—and a city that breathes like a park.
