Islands and seabed topography A fast look at the views across the Dishui lake and towards the sea makes clear to me that gmp’s master plan gave priority to the wrong element. The new lakes would be smaller than the original one in order to reinforce the visual interaction across them and, more importantly, the topography of the islands would offer a much stronger landscape in the background. The depth of the lakes is pushed to the extreme (around -15 m in the bigger ones) in order to favour the formation of internal currents that would improve the quality of the water and generate the biggest possible reserve of soil to be used for the islands formation. To respect the earth volume balance, the resultant topography is still quite limited, thus most of the slope is concentrated along belts of public space that rise on top of the adjacent urban fabric, offering views to the sea even from the more internal areas.
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