1. Origin
Sunac Nantong Jiuli Taoyuan is located on Yongxing Avenue in Gangzha District, Nantong, and covers an area of approximately 5,000 square metres. The site is embraced by a wetland park on the outside and adjoins classical Chinese villas on the inside. The key challenge was how to weave together the site’s poetic Eastern character and cultural atmosphere, and choreograph a landscape journey that feels contemplative rather than conventional.
In response, the design team sought to draw upon the source of water, the aura of classical aesthetics, and recent insights gained from the study of Chinese landscape painting theory, creating a mountain-dwelling rhapsody shaped by a pictorial mode of perception.
2. Design Foundation
The project proposes another “way of seeing”: a creative mode of experience informed by strong pre-existing visual schemas. It offers a new perspective on promenade-based landscape experience. As the painter Huang Binhong once remarked when teaching his students, people tend to look at things through a single rule of “near objects appear larger, distant objects smaller,” while he always held in mind the intrinsic proportion among things themselves.
Before leading visitors into this abstract expanse of mountains and water, the design team first established seven conceptual lenses that support this way of seeing: freehand expression and refined depiction; dynamic climax and static climax; single focus and dispersed focus; inhabitable, traversable, and viewable landscapes; the threshold of entering the painting and screened views; misty distance; numinous presence; and elsewhere. The first three guide the overall composition, while the latter four shape more localised spatial design.
Freehand Expression and Refined Depiction
Chinese landscape painting distinguishes between broad, expressive brushwork and more delicate, descriptive rendering. The former privileges the artist’s subjective emotion; the latter attends more closely to the truthful depiction of visible form.
Dynamic Climax and Static Climax; Single Focus and Dispersed Focus
The climax of Chinese painting is often dynamic, whereas Western painting has traditionally leaned toward a more static climax. A static climax emphasises form and fixed posture: all movement converges on a single instant and a single image. A dynamic climax, by contrast, downplays isolated form and values temporal continuity; every formal element serves the unfolding flow of experience.
Many contemporary demonstration landscapes remain shaped by Western pictorial conventions and architecture-centred thinking. The sales centre is often treated as a sculptural object, with every surrounding element arranged to exalt it and generate a single-point “aura.” As a result, the forecourt is compressed into a flattened stage, rich in spectacle yet thin in experience.
The design team chose a different path: the building becomes one element within the composition, a participant in the pictorial scene rather than its overbearing sole protagonist.
Inhabitable, Traversable, and Viewable
In The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams, landscapes are described as places one may inhabit, traverse, and behold. The design team interprets “viewable” as form and visual presence, “inhabitable” as fragments of everyday life, and “traversable” as spatial continuity.
Most demonstration landscapes today prioritise what can be looked at, followed by what can be moved through, while the everyday quality of inhabitation is often considered insufficiently “elegant.” This project instead embraces a subtle sense of lived warmth. Beyond the customary inclusion of children’s play areas, it seeks to cultivate an overall atmosphere of comfort through human-scaled spaces, tactile materials, and genuine usability. Quality is established through experience, rather than assembled through ornamental form.
The Threshold of Entering the Painting and Screened Views
Chinese landscape paintings often begin with a rock, a grove, or another visual screen. Such an opening creates a counterpoint akin to the classical image of birdsong deepening the quiet of the mountain. By partially obstructing the view, it arouses curiosity and prompts a desire to explore. This momentary pause also prepares the mind for discovery.
The design team believes that this kind of “gateway into nature,” when applied to an urban frontage burdened by visual clutter, feels more natural and immersive than a literal ceremonial gate.
Misty Distance
Guo Xi proposed the “Three Distances” in The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams: level distance, deep distance, and high distance. Han Zhuo later extended this system with broad distance, misty distance, and secluded distance. Misty distance refers to scenes veiled by vapour, where wild waters intervene and distant forms appear only faintly discernible. Such a sensibility can be found in Fu Shan’s Night Scene of the Western Village.
Numinous Presence
Panoramic landscape paintings of earlier periods often drew the middle and far distances nearer, reduced the foreground, and enlarged the central mass of the scene, thereby producing a heightened, almost transcendent sense of presence. Cao Zhibai’s Group of Peaks Clearing After Snow and Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams both reveal this spatial strategy.
Elsewhere
Antiquity and remoteness are two enduring aspirations of Chinese landscape painting: one belongs to time, the other to space. Zhao Mengfu famously stated that painting is valuable for its “ancient spirit”; without it, technical skill alone is of little consequence. Guo Xi articulated level, deep, and high distance, while Han Zhuo added broad, misty, and secluded distance.
For the design team, these pursuits ultimately converge in the idea of “elsewhere” — a return to origins, where one regains inner strength. It is like a great river withdrawing into a stream, or heaven and earth returning to their primordial beginning, as suggested in Gong Xian’s landscape albums.
With these seven ideas established, the design may be read through three spatial chapters, each translating painting theory into lived landscape experience.
3. Fractured Rock at the Garden Threshold
At the entrance, the design rejects the official, mansion-like image of a conventional ceremonial gate. Instead, a series of undulating screen walls rising to approximately four metres, together with a grove of canopy trees, evoke the painterly device of “massive rocks blocking the path and pines veiling the view.” This composition enters into dialogue with the wetland park across the way.
The design team sees this strategy of separation as more immersive. The walls and the many details throughout the garden are kept deliberately restrained, setting up a contrast with the classical Chinese courtyard that follows and forming a paired relationship between bold freehand expression and refined depiction.
4. A Spiritual Exchange of Dwelling, Viewing, and Wandering
Descending along the wall and the slope, visitors are drawn into the valley by a 35-metre double-pitched corridor, conceived almost as a tunnel through time. Its exceptionally low eaves and the raised water surface together unfold into a horizontally extended landscape scroll.
The design team hoped that visitors would first encounter this concentrated mountain-and-water scene as viewers of a painting. Upon reaching the forecourt and stepping onto the sandbar, they would then shift into the role of figures within the painting, experiencing the ease of life amid the landscape. In this way, the same scene is activated through a dual condition: viewed from without, and inhabited from within, generating a layered sensory immersion.
The overall composition draws inspiration from Zhu Xi’s poem Reflections on Reading:
“A half-acre pond opens like a mirror;
sky light and cloud shadows drift across it.
How can it remain so clear?
Because fresh water flows from its source.”
The water surface is designed to reflect the sky in stillness, magnifying the sense of a vast “heavenly mirror held within a vessel.” At the same time, the water space embeds a subtle dynamic line within this calm setting: the source is concealed, the water’s end is gathered, and movement is sensed rather than overtly displayed. This quiet current naturally guides visitors toward the building forecourt.
When visitors stand upon the sandbar and look back at the miniature mountain realm from within the composition, the design amplifies the scale of the island trees and introduces linear misting to strengthen the island’s numinous presence. This concentrates attention toward the middle ground while reducing visual disturbance from distant construction interfaces. The sloped corridor previously traversed now reappears like a mountain village within the picture, becoming the finishing stroke of the backward view.
5. Searching for Elsewhere
Exiting laterally from the lifestyle aesthetics pavilion, visitors enter a secluded path leading toward a classical garden imagined as a Peach Blossom Spring. Bamboo is used here to catch light and wind, extending the rustling sound of riverside bamboo groves along this nearly 100-metre walkway.
Through nature’s quiet murmur, the design team sought to cleanse the mind and awaken anticipation for the next chapter of the garden journey.
Overall, the project reconsiders the enduring legacy of Chinese landscape painting and uses it to explore a different design framework for promenade-based landscapes. Between the contemporary and the classical, the Western and the Eastern, it seeks a thoughtful point of leverage from which new spatial possibilities may emerge.
