White Upland：Dream within the dream

Wutopia Lab was commissioned by Shanghai Huijian to create a steel garden called White Upland in Huzhou. This 3,300-square-meter midsummer-night-dream garden is the sales front court for the client's Huzhou residential sales center. It is also Wutopia Lab's first attempt to integrate architecture, landscape, interior, lighting, and installation art into a single magical-realist place. The client wanted an unconventional marketing scene to express their refined product philosophy, yet they had no existing reference for what that scene should be; they were certain it could not be the typical landscape seen on the market. The designer conceived a dreamlike, purified space connected by cherished but somewhat vague memories, expressing a lightness that can bear the weight of the world. White Upland is bounded by 529 six-meter-high steel columns that form a translucent, complete edge, visually defining two worlds while allowing each to bleed into the other. The magical-realist garden dissolves the original sales-center facade and becomes a new place for rediscovering one's body, identity, and time. Inside the boundary, 108 giant steel three-leaf clovers create a forest; among them are caves, hillocks, streams, springs, a theater, boulders, and wasteland, but nature has been rewritten as refined geometry, all in white.