Poly Dream Factory

Poly DreamWorks in the Sanshan area of Nanhai, Foshan, is Poly South China's esports-themed cultural-industrial park, developed by Poly Group with landscape by ACA (Maiken Landscape, Division One) and interior design by Langsheng Design. Positioned as the Greater Bay Area's first esports industrial project, the master plan mixes an esports arena, industrial offices, retail, LOFT apartments, youth apartments and long-term rental housing, and includes a national Grade-A esports arena intended to fill a regional gap in professional competition venues. The landscape concept, Red versus Blue, stages a permanent dialogue between confrontation and fusion: one half incandescent, one half calm; half water, half forest; half competition, half collaboration. The site's main challenge was that, as an almost unprecedented programme, architecture, interior and landscape all had to encode esports while also linking esports and office users into an inclusive, participatory landscape container. At the esports gate, the designers widened the municipal road opening from 26 to 58 metres to create a large marketing plaza, and commissioned sculptor Ye Zhenghua's surfing elephant as the project's signature IP, floating on a vast mirror pool that reflects the showroom—conceived as a space capsule and functioning as a secondary esports hall. The esports plaza extends the indoor competition programme outdoors, centred on a blue competitive elephant whose trunk and tail house speaking tubes for playful participation; yellow ribbon-like bands link it to the High Park youth zone. The Star Tower, the building's photo point, is treated as a space-station transmission tower, its messy road-side masked by curved mirror stainless steel that reflects the tower and arena into a giant funhouse. By contrast, the industrial-office zone is ecological, quiet and rational, aiming to deliver working inside a forest: matrix woodlands soften the municipal road, linear paving and benches guide movement, and under-canopy spaces accommodate outdoor work, business talks, team meetings and informal gaming. The High Park adds outdoor fitness, hammocks, interactive mist devices and pavement motifs borrowed from World of Warcraft totems, serving teenagers and children as well as esports workers. The project's ambition is to position ACA at the frontier of lifestyle, creative and social esports culture in the Greater Bay Area.