Chenjia Jia Bai Road, Chengdu

Jiabaidao in central Chengdu, formerly the ill-fated Armani Residences designed by Giorgio Armani himself and later an infamous unfinished tower, has been redeveloped by Cenjia Group through a comprehensive upgrade of architecture, landscape and interiors. The landscape, by WTD Vesper Design, treats the existing twin-tower form - which encloses one large courtyard and five awkward corner pockets - as a given to be softened. Surrounded by an old, tight urban fabric, the site suffered from fragmented corners, over-built fire-access paving and crowded facade vents; the design had to (1) pull visitors out of the drab street into an immersive, quiet, art-filled world, and (2) turn hard fire surfaces into landscape while maximising wandering routes and sightlines. The facade is inspired by the Chinese orchid ("the orchid grows in the forest, and does not cease to fragrance because no one is there"), and the landscape extends that orchid language - vertical rooting paired with horizontal spreading - to bind architecture and landscape into a growing living organism. The entry and building masses form a triangular layout that yields the longest sight distance; entering from two sides maximises the courtyard area and a meandering loop. The entry pavilion uses full-coverage 3D curved aluminium panels in gold-grey with leaping scale-like motifs, and a glass screen filters views into the water courtyard. Parametrically graded diamond lattice walls read as floating gold ribbons, set above a Wyndham-grey stone plinth and softened by oil palms from Malaysia. Plants are used as a second, living enclosure; the team extracted motifs from Rousseau's Dream, Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest and Equatorial Jungle, using form, colour and texture to recreate the painter's lush tone. The water-garden wall borrows from Rousseau's woman in the forest to build a flowing, layered art wall. The submerged-forest concept is inspired by Monet's Water Lilies: tiered pools at different depths, patterned bottoms and aquatic plants produce shifting blue-green tones; the deepest basin uses crushed Amazon Green marble to create a dark emerald. A custom 10-by-0.8-metre transparent acrylic aquarium is embedded into one side so visitors can observe the underwater ecosystem from a side angle, with hardy pond plants in the main pool and more delicate species in the acrylic tank, plus small native fish that graze algae. Two sculptures by artist Xiang Jing anchor the garden - a 5.9-metre reclining piece and a four-metre vertical work - making Jiabaidao the only high-end residential project in Chengdu to feature original Xiang Jing sculptures.