Planning a festival can’t be easy, especially when it takes place in the biggest tourist attraction in the capital of the most populated country in the world. So, for this year’s National Day festivities, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry is turning to the most precise methods for planning their intricate flower displays. For the one-week holiday, beginning October 1st, the bureau’s planners are 3D printing prototypes to better prepare for one of the festival’s biggest attractions.
In order to coordinate their display in Tian’anmen Square, the bureau will first design the elaborate display, made up of 750,000 flowerpots with 120 types of flowers, digitally. The CAD models will then be 3D printed and arranged according to their blueprints. As the festival approaches, the actual flowers will be matched to the printed model at the center of the square, spanning 50 meters across and climbing 15 meters high. The arrangements will even feature a 3-meter-wide peony weighing 300 kilograms.
According to the landscape bureau’s deputy director, Zhou Jianping, the ten displays to be constructed are designed to reflect Chinese cultural elements, including the Peking Opera, New Year paintings, and shadow plays, among other things. And, to ensure that the flowers will survive the Chinese autumn, gardeners will be using supplementing local plant species with special supplements to stretch their lifespan. The flower displays have been a part of the National Day festivities for the past 28 years with this year celebrating the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
No pictures of the 3D printed prototypes for National Day, yet, but, from the looks of the work that goes into assembling their displays, they might have better things to do than snap photos of plastic 😛
