Nine Songs of Yuzhou Jiayu Dongfang

Yuzhou Jiusong Jiayu Dongfang is a 4,136-square-metre demonstration landscape at the intersection of Qiaotouji Road and Yuxi Road in Feidong, Hefei, Anhui, completed in November 2020, with landscape design by QIDI Landscape's Original Stone division, interior by Shanghai Mude Architecture, facade consultancy by Shanghai Anlei Curtain Wall, and construction by Anhui Zhongding Garden Engineering. The developer is Hefei Yuzhou Real Estate. The site's challenge is an L-shaped plot beneath an elevated highway: the entire east face looks onto the viaduct, severely limiting facade presentation, and the distance from the north municipal plaza to the far side is about 140 metres, with the red line tight against the municipal road. How to stage a long frontage that expresses the project's character and culture is the central design question. Continuing the architecture's Song-dynasty minimalism, the team pursues a restrained, rustic, elegant mood that draws on the Northern Song literati gathering known as the Western Garden Elegant Party, where scholars wrote, painted, played instruments and drank tea. The theme 'admiring mountains and waters' extracts six observations from the sixteen classic scenes of the elegant party: awakening stone, knocking the hermit's gate, holding seclusion, tasting Brahman, asking the moon and scoring the spring. The first observation, Awakening Stone, places a people-shaped motif on the street-side feature wall; coffee-coloured aluminium louvres combine with a pure white mountain-shaped wall, layered hedges, and a small artist IP figure called Xiao Yu'Er to set the first-quality arrival. Knocking the Hermit is a 64-metre landscape colonnade along the 140-metre street front, its roof echoing the architecture as rolling mountain forms, combined with layered feature walls and flower borders; metal mesh curtains filter views, strip-stone water features cross beneath, and the relief of the mountain wall isolates the city from the inner garden. Holding Seclusion moves through the quiet valley into a bright blue-green hollow; an earlier boardwalk through grass slopes was cut for cost, but a curved grass slope was retained as an immersive resting platform, enclosed by a rubble wall and a coffee-coloured metal gate that invites further exploration. Tasting Brahman opens onto a bright, otherworldly garden: a winding boardwalk crosses mirror water, a boat-shaped planter floats like a small craft on a lake, and at the boardwalk's end sits a mountain-shaped art pavilion; at the far end, a shale wall is studded with constellation lights, the archer crossing the Milky Way. Asking the Moon and Scoring the Spring close the sequence: at the end of the water, one sits and watches clouds rise, and the whole journey, through constructed art and natural mood, leaves the visitor calmly content. The project turns the site's disadvantage, a long municipal frontage beneath an elevated road, into a 64-metre colonnade that echoes the architecture and produces a step-by-scene unfolding; after ten-plus rounds of scheme optimisation and close collaboration with the client, the scheme was built in only a few months from tender in July 2020.