Text description provided by the architects
Greentown Osmanthus Chaoyang in Chengdu, the second of Greentown's Guiyu series in the city, is a landscape renovation designed by AOBO Landscape and completed in 2021 on less than one thousand square metres in Jitou Town, Chengdu. The design pursues the refined, easygoing lifestyle deeply encoded in Chengdu's culture, following the rigorous quality ethos of the Guiyu series. The site is tiny, and the design challenge is to break through its constraints. The team constructs a modern Eastern aesthetic space that is not grand but inward, contemplative and vast, using a winding, unfolding circulation that abandons the straight narrative axis of traditional layouts, opening and closing the sequence to produce a one-step-one-view rhythm and maximising the limited land. Trees and walls are paired as a compositional device, with minimalist point-line-area design that frames the walker within an immersive courtyard. Light, water, mirror surfaces and layered spatial forms organise a Zen-like Eastern mood, while the design extracts classical garden elements of light, forest, stone, boat and wall, recombined through new forms and materials and set against generous blank space for a high-end material quality. The experience unfolds as a sequence: entering the hidden lodge, white walls and green trees with minimalist columns and paired lamp posts welcome the return; the square pond mirrors sky and clouds, the wall blocking sight yet creating a new view as one turns; a boat moored in light carries the returning heart to the quiet bank; and the forest retreat invites a philosophical dialogue with inner nature. The designers trace the spiritual source of Chinese aesthetics, hoping the project will feel a return to unadorned nature and the simplicity of the greatest principles, placing the poetry of life within a small courtyard.
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