Qinghui Bank

Qinghui'an, a Longfor residential neighbourhood in Chongqing's New River and City development, designed by WTD Design between October 2015 and December 2016 and completed in December 2017 on a 62,700-square-metre site, is a study in accepting a difficult topography rather than smoothing it away. The ground is irregular, heavily sloped and crisscrossed by fire-access constraints; the designers' first move was to accept the terrain, the existing building layout and the fire-code impositions as givens, and then to read the site's own skeleton. Straight, turning and overlapping lines are used to stitch the landscape fabric into the architectural order so that the two grow together. The neighbourhood comprises two high-rise towers and 19 low-rise garden houses, housing 358 and 678 households respectively; because the high-rises sit on the northwest and the low-rises on the southwest, the resulting west internal court carries a much higher density of use than the rest of the site. The concentrated children's play area is therefore placed at the westernmost edge of that court, and the site's east-to-west drop is used to carry play noise outward to the open boundary rather than toward the north and south residents. East of the play area, a broad undifferentiated lawn buffers the core and links to a waterside park, while the low-rise courts on the east deliberately spread human activity thinly to minimise disturbance. An 8-percent slope steps gently into the water, with paving following the waterline and staggered sitting points tuned to both prospect and privacy. Drawing on Longfor's long property-management data and WTD's decade of project analysis, the team computed each sub-area's capacity, supervision radius and even the angles of "watching" and "being watched" to reconcile function, play, beauty and connectivity. The large building set-backs generate long retaining walls that cut circulation into fragments; rather than hide or repair these, the design uses the collision of planes to carry and convert the site's vertical energy, turning a constraint into the project's defining gesture.