Chongqing Langshi Yuefu

This sales pavilion for Landsea's Yuefu project in Chongqing occupies a 60-meter hill in the Caijia group of Beibei District, bordered by natural mountains on the west, north and east and fronting Tongkang Road, a new-town arterial, on the south. The showroom is raised roughly six meters above the street, and because the site is zoned as park green space it will eventually be handed over to the municipality as part of an urban-park cultural building. Given this public, civic character and the site's native emotional memory, the design rejects the typical enclosed, inward-facing showroom and instead pursues an open, artistic, weightless place that sits like a floating art museum in the forest. Nature is the enduring theme: the design preserves and restores the original terraces and meadows in an artistic way, answering the site's cultural memory and the mountain affection that Chongqing people carry in their bones. From the cantilevered viewing platform, visitors hear cascading water, touch soft yet rough pennisetum, watch miscanthus sway in the wind and feel spray, summoning the sensations of a forest interior. Straight lines belong to artifice, curves to nature; the contrast of straight and curved, assertive and restrained, hard and soft, lifts the building away from the ground so that it reads as a sky city floating above the forest. An immense mirror pool reflects sky, nature and architecture, dissolving the boundary between the made and the natural, and the dramatic topography further separates the artificial from the wild to intensify the floating effect. Designed under design director Chang Lei and built by Sichuan Jintianxia Landscape Engineering, the result is a paradoxical yet unified whole in which a building meant for commerce becomes a quiet gallery of the mountain itself.