Chongqing Vanke Future Star

Vanke Future Starlight in Yubei District, Chongqing, is a 4,500-square-metre residential demonstration landscape designed by the team of Wang Xiaoli, Zhang Zhichao and Dai Taizhong (concept) with Liang Jie, Li Nan and Wang Xiuquan (working drawings), developed by Vanke Chongqing and presented in June 2020. The designers wanted the future scene to read as intelligent, ecological and healthy, yet beautiful in a way that moves visitors and endures over time, rather than pursuing formal beauty for its own sake. Responding to the site's terraced condition, they evoked the resort atmosphere of island living, aiming for an entry that is already a garden and a garden that reads as a picture, casual and enduring. The scheme is narrated in three acts: one pool, one forest, one tree. The first act, the forecourt, uses restrained means to set off the futuristic building: a spare mirror pool, star-trail ripples and a sculpture that looks up at the sky, telling the future in an approachable, everyday way. The second act, the return path under the forest, is the most realistic presentation of the future arrival route; the pedestrian flow itself becomes part of the picture, realising the image of a thousand stars entering dreams across a green island. The third act, the 24-metre pure-green planting between apartment blocks, is defined as a green-island dwelling where residents step down into pocket spaces of community interaction. A single tree acts as a communal social tree, a spiritual totem of neighbourly exchange. The team, together with client and contractor, scouted the country to select each specimen tree as a dream-star. Materials are chosen with equal care: translucent resin-imitation-glass for the sculpture to echo the lightness of the forest, and translucent concrete inserted at resting nodes to surprise those pausing on the way home. Architecture by LWK+PARTNERS and Chongqing Design Institute, interiors by ENJOYDESIGN, landscape build by Gongchuang Garden.