Zhonghai Mission Hills Mansion, Guangzhou

Seaguang Mansion sits on Da Gan Wei in Guangzhou's Haizhu District, directly on the Pearl River, and the design process began the moment, walking past a long wall of old factory buildings, the river suddenly opened in front of the site. The team asked three questions: how to draw people naturally to the water, how to make them linger by the river and feel its power, and how to address the leisurely Pearl River with a civic, ritual sense of life. Rather than enclosing the sales center as is conventional, the design opens the space and stages the showroom as a riverside theater, decomposed into a children's theater, a light-and-shadow theater, a sky theater and a horizon theater that give the romantic Pearl River back to citizens. Named after Haizhu, the sea's pearl, the Haibao playground strips away the unnecessary, lets the river be the protagonist, and uses readable, habitable, viewable terrain to invite exploratory and self-directed play; park-like open flows let visitors take in the river from many angles, and tree shade covers the main resting and passage zones in the local climate. After the children's theater, the mood shifts from joy to stillness. Because waterway regulations prohibit large structures and walls over one meter, the team found its motif in the boats gliding on the river: ship bows combined with colored glass form a distinctive decorative language that expresses the local theme of Pearl River flowing light. Planting minimizes the middle layer, relying on large belt-like groves with ornamental grasses and rounded shrubs for an open, transparent view, and trees enclose a resting grove at the widest river prospect. At the most open point, the riverside aesthetics pavilion stands on layered cascades; the sky theater uses mirror surfaces and mist to make visitors feel they are on a stage, reflecting sky and greenery and guiding them toward the pavilion. Because the showroom will be permanently retained as part of a future riverside park, the team aimed beyond sales functions to give the city a natural, relaxed public space that, in a post-pandemic era, invites people back to healthy, shared life. The 12,040-square-meter site carries an 11,467-square-meter landscape and a 660-square-meter building.