Xingchenhai

Xingchen Sea, by Zhilan Landscape, lies in the Phoenix Lake park area of Yongchuan, western Chongqing, one city away from the famous Tea Mountain and Bamboo Sea, in a district planned as a mature residential quarter with educational and commercial amenities. On first visit the site felt raw: a long, narrow trapezoid between 20 and 40 meters wide, crossed by municipal utility lines that prohibited large water features and structures. Yet looking back toward Tea Mountain, whose profile vanishes in mist, the team returned to the project name and decomposed it: mining the reclusive, elegant temperament of Yongchuan's hills, they set out to build a peach-blossom spring within the world, sheltering a patch of starlight and a corner of mountain and sea. After repeated site walks, the experience is organized as Watching the Stars at Ji Mountain, Seeking the Chen in the Grove, and Overlooking the Sea from the Elegant Lodge, using gathering and enclosing layouts to tune the emotional tempo so that visitors slow down, see the stars and hear their truest inner voice. The outer prospect is framed by rows of dawn redwood and irregular jacaranda, and a 5.5-meter-tall wall range nearly 45 meters wide hides the building in its embrace like a dwelling in the mountains. Instead of the entry's beige ceramic panels, the inner walls use sesame-black chiseled granite to suggest the wild skin of Ji Mountain; fiber-optic star lamps embedded in the stone seams cast starlight onto the ink-dark valleys and slopes. The inner route uses greenery as the wall's outer skin, with layered but controlled planting and placed boulders that recreate the image of finding the way home through a forest. At the end of the gorge, a 620-square-meter water feature spreads from the building's gray space and lifts it gently, with dawn redwoods and flowering islands floating on the mirror surface; the water is not the protagonist but a reflector of light, trees and cloud, in which visitors see their own reflections. A single star, a grove of redwoods and one garden set the noise of the world aside.