Text description provided by the architects
On first seeing the site, the WTD design team was struck by an openness that felt like raw wilderness: a broad native slope dropping into a hollow, with the valley and distant ridges laid out before it, half-man-high grasses moving in the wind, and weathered stones fractured into beautiful textures. Vanke Puyuan sits on both sides of Yuegang Avenue north of Chongqing's Central Park, with the demonstration area on the southeast slope. The site is roughly 150 meters wide and falls nearly twenty meters at an 18.5 percent grade—the dominant design challenge—while most of it is reserved green land whose front will become the main entrance to a future municipal park, and a 6.3 percent side road cuts through it. The native slope suggested the theme of original wilderness, and the team treated terrain and line, nature and material as intertwined, using minimal lines and soft tones to produce geometric and sculptural artistry. The twenty-meter drop is cut into three terraces so that walking never feels fatiguing: the first uses two parallel feature walls as a screen that holds back the city and blocks inward views, preserving curiosity; the second converts grade through stairs and a square tower that also shields sightlines, with the tower earth-sheltered on two levels so that an upper lawn and pine grove give the sensation of walking through woods while a lower gray space supports seating; the third descends slowly through a quiet art corridor toward the inner scene. Grey-white walls and angled lines build geometric wholeness, so that from outside the site cannot be taken in at a glance. Rhythm is built through openings and closings: from the screened entrance to a courtyard held by a single upward-growing tree and a quiet bench; then through the high wall and a narrow slot of light toward an open viewing platform; finally through a forty-meter-high walled corridor that narrows until a vineyard suddenly opens. Stripping away ornament, the design cuts light and nature with the simplest lines, producing views narrow or wide, near or far, horizontal or vertical. Extending the wilderness idea, a natural open vineyard responds to the sales gallery's wine-cellar theme and sustains a rustic yet elegant visual language, while architecture, landscape and interior interweave into a leisurely, subtly French atmosphere. People may pause to watch morning mist lift and evening color gather, and in that stillness find fullness of life—the original realm returned as poetry written in space.