Waterdrop Garden

Be Water, My Friend. MixC World in Shenzhen's Nanshan district is currently the city's most popular commercial street, whose scenes shift with seasons and festivals. On its fourth floor, a rooftop garden connects an office tower with the mall and serves as a shared leisure space for nearby residents. Facing diverse users and changing scenarios, the team proposed a gathering-and-dispersing solution inspired by water droplets, which are at once tangible and formless: a Waterdrop Garden that accommodates large commercial events while supporting individualized lifestyles. The garden gathers around a roughly 500-square-meter sunken Waterdrop Plaza, whose edges are terraced at varying heights to form natural seating; through planting, the terraces relate to and withdraw from the plaza for rich spatial variation. A set of water-drop installations anchors the plaza and doubles as interactive mist features: by day children play among them, and at night droplet-like lights on dark paving glow like stars reflected in mist, drawing young visitors. Around the central plaza, pocket spaces offer customized moments: a city viewing terrace to the north, a floating wooden garden tatami under shade to the east, a miniature shaded garden to the south, and an office garden of flexible furniture to the west. Through the day, the vitality between pockets and center shifts like water. The seating itself is treated as improvisation: must a bench be 450 millimeters high and 600 millimeters wide? Extended benches allow comfortable social distance, wider surfaces allow reclining, wooden caps on low walls become seats, trees on raised decks become tatami platforms, steel ribs under benches serve as storage, and rounded corners protect children, while movable furniture lets users arrange space to their own needs.