City Library Plaza and Urban Planning Exhibition Hall in Shenyang

When riding a bus in my home city Shenyang, I noticed a huge, pleasant looking plaza populated with intriguing figurative sculptures and surrounded by idiosyncratically shaped buildings, and I made an effort to spend some time in the plaza with my parents and my sister.

It was almost a sunken plaza, due to the ever taller highrises being built around this oasis.  When I lived there, I had never visited this part of the city and the growth or sprawling of this metropolis was quite impressive and disheartening. 







The plaza was actually called City Library Plaza and the huge sloping structure was the library itself.  The metal sculptures were culled from a now-demolished soccer stadium, long been replaced by a fancier one, used for preliminary soccer matches during 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.









The boxy structure to the right of the library in the picture below was a Children Center and the domed structure, to the left of the library, in the following picture was a Science Center:





I was also quite taken by the installation near the library:



The Library was not very flamboyant comparing to other buildings in the plaza but I was impressed by its large space and many programs it offered, much like a civic library in the US, a thing unheard of before I left China; Chinese libraries then were loft institutions and one must had some introductory letter to be able to use them.





Not only the library had spacious reading rooms, it also had some exhibition space and then was showcasing some calligraphy works, written in a huge array of styles:





Further behind the plaza, there was a large park, Popular Science Park, and a modest but interesting museum - Urban Planning Exhibition Hall.  It was free but we must present our I.D.s to enter.  During our staying there, we were the only visitors to this quite pleasant place:










Exhibition Hall at night

There were many people in the park - socializing, dancing and exercising, including these two people doing their bizarre whipping exercise:



Urban living can be pleasant and exciting.


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 Label: Shenyang, Shenyang Trip 2013