Jiucheng Center: Sunken-Superstructure Children's Play Area

The Sunken Children's Play Area at Jiucheng Center Shangzhu in Luzhou, Sichuan, developed by Luzhou Sanxi Real Estate and designed by He Hao, Tang Yan, Tang Qingling and Zhang Linzi, is a 1,170-square-metre landscape experiment in Suprematist art. The project quotes Malevich: only night belongs to the imagination; Suprematism does not make decoration but expresses harmony. Built on the rectilinear base of a modern minimalist residential atrium, the play area extracts and intensifies simple geometric forms and pure colour—dominant yellow and blue—so that children feel shape and colour and are prompted to imagine and create. The design extends Malevich's vocabulary into graphics and colour, then fuses it with childlike play: circular flower planters in summer shade, open upper-lower corridors at dusk, ordinary places that trigger remembered childhood joy. The composition uses simple geometry to build varied spatial experiences through combination and formal variation, allowing children to laugh, run, climb, cross, slide and bounce. A colourful polka-dot mirrored cylinder space collides Pop-art dots with reflective surfaces to produce a dreamlike interactive room that frees children from conventional play-equipment typology. Two corridor-like play structures link vertically and horizontally, letting children move between colour fields; each small space is a complete colour-plan composition, quietly teaching aesthetic awareness. A circular play zone supports hide-and-seek, climbing and quiet reading, with complementary inner-outer colours as a direct lesson in colour theory. Transparent acrylic windows cast coloured light onto the floor, and circular arches with square openings distil Suprematist purity. The project argues that aesthetic education returns children to their intuitive life, using beauty to soften their eyes and hearts, and that the built environment should plant a seed of art and happiness in childhood memory.