JingLin jiu Xu

Longfor Jinglin Jiuxu in Chongqing is a residential landscape by HWA that stages a date with nature and a dream planted in flower beds. Chongqing, the mountain city and fog capital, is now remaking itself as a forest city, and Longfor, after twenty-five years of observing urban life, set out to deliver a livable home that combines green, natural and ecological feeling with technology, quality and experience. The site, however, was far from ideal: on Chongqing's already complex terrain, the ground contained a roughly forty-meter-deep pit, a major construction challenge that the designers welcomed as a source of possibility. The concept of a forest home organized the project around six themes: quality, technology, ecology, experience, nature and green. After six rounds of revision, the design evolved from an early scheme that kept the pit as an interactive installation ringed by a treetop walk, to a second scheme that turned the right side into a south-to-north cascading waterside zone with a giant projection screen for a starry-sky theater and a feather-inspired textured slope, to a final scheme that accepted the inevitable backfill and its settlement risk by composing the ground as a field of uniformly shaped but variably sized planting beds called dream-planting beds: plant a seed, and a flower of dreams will grow. At the end of the beds, a viewing platform lets visitors pause and look back into a sunken space that frames the whole demonstration area; from a distance, the beds appear to rise from the ground and float in the sky. The arrival face is a broad mirror pool that reflects the sales gallery, the mountain city's sky and the natural ecology, a tribute to nature. An eye of time then leads visitors through a strange tunnel lined with light strips that shrinks the world and opens into an Alice-in-Wonderland clearing. The dream-planting beds float among flowers, a cloud-walk terrace uses mist and terrain to suggest a celestial realm, and an ecological rain garden running through the project makes visitors feel the pulse of the earth and the breath of the rainforest. The project was realized with the support of developer Longfor and contractor Chongqing Jisheng Landscape, and is located in Chongqing.