Text description provided by the architects
Sunac Chong'an Lanting Number One Courtyard is a demonstration landscape by Qidi Landscape (structural engineer Zhu Jun) for Sunac Shanghai and Wuxi product centres, in Liangxi District, Wuxi. The 5,719-square-metre project was designed and built in 2021. Wuxi has been known as Little Shanghai since the Republican era, and Chong'an is the city's historic origin; the project aims to return Chong'an to its centre, reviving the grand manner of Shanghai-patrician estates and offering a quiet, resort-like urban luxury. Rather than a conventional sales gallery, the scheme is designed as a block-level pocket landscape fused with the city, producing privatized public life. A hotel-style roundabout drop-off softens the boundary between street and interior, leading visitors toward a water court. The spirit totem is a single imported Japanese black pine, about eight metres across and three metres high, paired with a dynamic water feature; a second, seven-metre Japanese red pine anchors the sunken clubhouse as a view from all three elevations. Polished and natural stone, metal and water-wall textures deliver restrained luxury, and a filter of pine needles and louvers casts narrow strips of light that mark the order of time. The former courtyard is reinterpreted as an L-shaped multi-level water feature that blurs interior and exterior edges; small metal sculptures on the water and varied fountain heights enrich vertical art. The pocket park near the main road becomes a show-corner plaza for future retail, with metal lines, stone and glass on the facade; the interactive leisure area uses stepped terrain change, and the quiet woodland rest area is half-screened by planting. Planters and walls use black-and-gold inlay, with local cultural text reinforcing identity. The project interprets a revived Chong'an literary lineage through four gates and twelve scenes, treating memory and modern luxury as one.
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