COFCO Tianyue 1 · Running Water Art Museum

The Flowing Water Art Museum at COFCO Tianyue No.1 in Chongqing is an 8,500-square-metre landscape and architectural project completed in September 2020, developed by Joy City Holdings Chongqing and built by Chongqing Jisheng Landscape. The site sits on the Jialing River, facing the ancient Ciqikou water town across the water and the mass of Gele Mountain behind; although the existing shell was a decade-old unfinished French-style structure, it was already buried in lush greenery, damp classical walls, dappled stone steps and a quiet riverside wildness. The design team, working from the older French axis, lays a white canvas over the site and introduces existing natural elements—light, stone, rain, river—into the interior, amplifying sensory experience while also releasing the site's own natural forces, including a sapium tree growing skyward through the glass. The museum is organised around water as its soul: an entrance cascade falls from above, and that flow continues from sky to ground to the Jialing River, forming the project's first threshold. White defines the atmosphere, an endless, eternal calm in which nature quietly acts. Light is treated as a canvas: square openings in the roof draw the sky into the interior, producing changing beams of sunlight, and a volcanic-stone light-and-shadow wall lets visitors walk through light as if in conversation with it. At the riverside viewing terrace, a waterfall curtain appears to come from nowhere and pour into the Jialing, binding the museum to the river; through the mist, Gele Mountain and the ancient town of Ciqikou frame the view. In the curtain, a boat-shaped stone carved from natural rock quietly holds time. An interior gallery, set toward the west at the point where the river bends, forms a viewing terrace whose tree canopies act as a natural picture frame. The unbounded water surface reads as continuous with the distant Jialing, giving the illusion of floating; at night, the water reflects the city across the river, the bustle of Ciqikou and the quiet of Gele Mountain. Grey stone floors and white walls strip away unnecessary objects, and the boundary between light and shadow produces purity while the boundary between water and stone produces stillness and strength. The museum is intended to be both an independent object apart from its surroundings and a permeable space that can slip into everyday life and connect to the future city, a landmark on the Jialing that allows visitors to return to themselves and perceive, for even a moment, the freedom of light, water, stream, stone and tree.