Vanke Pu Yuan

Puyuan, the Vanke residential landscape in the Central Park area of Yubei, Chongqing, designed in 2022 by Blue Scale International under chief designers Ren Gang and Zeng Min, with construction by Pubang, extends over 26,663 square metres and takes its name from the uncarved jade, puyuan: found by chance, polished by time, natural on the surface but refined within. The project explicitly invokes Lawrence Halprin's dictum that what matters is not the design but life itself, and sets out to search for uncarved stones among rough mountains and forests, returning to an unadorned mode of living. Working within a constrained, complex site, the team pursues a natural, plain, authentic spatial form in which people, activity and landscape hold a quiet conversation; wind, rain, sun, spontaneously growing plants and natural landforms are simply allowed to "stay." The design unfolds through four interwoven themes. "The Growth of Boundaries, a world of plus-or-minus two metres" treats vertical growth as a wandering of edges, where looking up and looking down, or a small shift of viewpoint, reveals a different world; level changes are used to frame the sky, and the forty-metre-long "water-curtain waterfall" is made of six layers of aluminium chain — more than 400,000 aluminium components hand-threaded — with parametrically tuned length, width, curvature and colour gradation that ripples gently in sunlight. "Invitation and Being Invited, the transition of intangible realms" treats the ground plane as a continuously shifting field of embedment, spread, transition and layering, where no landscape has a hard boundary and every scene invites the next; water flows along a pearl-water outline into a stream, so that one hears water before seeing it. "Landscape as Self, the relationship of seeing and being seen" treats observation itself as a design clue: a reception room tucked into the mountain hides time and a way of conversing with nature, inviting nature inside so that sitting quietly in the courtyard, even in a narrow space, feels like roaming the world. "Independence and Interdependence, seeking a place for self" pursues a modern landscape in which distance is both independent and dependent, restoring belonging to the ground and freedom within the space. The palette is intentionally natural, using native materials and craft to pay tribute to nature, and the project is presented as a "living container" in which humanisation of nature gradually gives way to a naturalisation of the human.