Text description provided by the architects
On the shores of Puzhehei in Yunnan, the Sunac Puzhehei Anuo Town project is the first phase of a wellness resort town developed by Qiubei Global Century Exhibition Tourism and designed by Blue Design International's third studio, built by Sichuan Gaobiao. Puzhehei carries a long Yi-ethnic history in which fish totems appear beside almost every waterside village, a culture that eats fish and dreams of fish-like freedom. The designers asked how a modern resort landscape could speak to that place and its karst lakes without becoming a theme-park pastiche, and the answer draws on Toyo Ito's dictum that natural environment should break the rigidity of buildings. The brief is a one-stop wellness town combining leisure, residence, shopping and tourism. At the entrance, a cantilevered monolithic rock portal opens onto a rough stone facade that contrasts with wild, untrimmed reeds, producing a natural luxury. Beyond the threshold, a terraced water garden and waterside buildings are revealed in stages, and curved tree pits reach toward the lake like fish schooling at the surface. Light zigzag paths, locally quarved bluestone, plain yunnan hackberry trees and evening light compose a quiet, restrained material palette. Inside, sparse woodland meadows and hackberry-lined walks, paved with broken local bluestone, lead through an unassuming small gate into streets surfaced and decorated with local stone mills and wooden railings, evoking an idyll. The entrance rock portal was developed in Rhino with a three-dimensional model to fix its proportions, then handed to a specialist sculptor who built a maquette to study surface texture and colour before full-scale construction; a steel frame with angle-iron ribs, wire mesh and resin-modified mortar was sculpted and coated with stone-effect paint. The reflecting pool uses natural bottoms on undisturbed native soil and a microbe-and-aquatic-plant purification system, while sloped tree pits drain into U200 slotted channels to keep runoff out of the mirror pool. The result is a resort landscape that fuses Yi culture and local materials into a relaxed, back-to-nature atmosphere.
Editor's Pick
