Sanmi garden

Three Metre Garden is a small courtyard landscape project on Chongming Island in Shanghai, first commissioned in October 2017 for a rural villa whose architectural scheme had already gone through three or four rounds. The design team, led by Sun Yijia with Zhou Mi, Sheng Yunqi and others, had little interest in conventional villa garden work but took the commission because the owners were genuinely passionate about garden culture and the house itself was simple and clear. The brief arose when the owners asked for a boundary wall along the road to enclose the construction site; within half a day the team reframed the wall as the starting point for the entire external space, proposing the idea of treating the wall itself as the garden. This turned the project into an experiment in contemporary garden-making. From the mid-Ming dynasty onward, the wall became an increasingly important element in Chinese gardens, a more decisive and efficient means of dividing space and shifting scenic domains; the interleaving and overlapping of walls, corridors, pavilions and verandas gradually became the dominant compositional technique of Ming and Qing literati gardens. The team identified this history as the conceptual basis and historical precedent for the experiment. The resulting night aerial view shows the wall-and-garden weaving together with the main villa, blending into the greenery and the country lane beyond. The dialogue between Three Metre Garden and the house, its overall overlooking form, and its integration with planting and the rural path all develop the wall-as-garden idea into a restrained contemporary interpretation of the literati garden tradition. Project details are limited in the source material.