“Where there is a blank canvas, there is hope.” — Gustav Klimt

The Post-Sales Dilemma

Sales pavilion landscapes in Chinese residential developments occupy a peculiar position: designed with extraordinary intensity as marketing showpieces, they rapidly become “frozen enclaves” once the sales mission ends — too precious to demolish, too dysfunctional to inhabit. The Shenyang CTG Vanke Town Center exemplified this condition. Five years after its conception as a high-design demonstration pavilion, over-designed terrain, redundant water features, and ornamental barriers had severed circulation routes, suppressed social encounter, and rendered the space incompatible with daily life.

Unbinding: Making Way for Life

The renewal coincided with the construction of a new metro station, catalysing broader urban regeneration. THLA (Tianhua Landscape Architecture) was commissioned for landscape art direction and conceptual design. Our fundamental decision was subtraction rather than addition. We removed all redundant structures obstructing movement, including the existing water feature’s level changes, while preserving and repurposing its infrastructure into a participatory dry fountain plaza — a playful water park in warm seasons, an expansive platform during Shenyang’s harsh winters.
This act of “unbinding” — the systematic removal of design excess — reconnected severed spatial sequences. The simplification was not an end but a strategic opening: by clearing the ground, we created conditions for spontaneous public life to fill the space on its own terms.

Dopamine Urbanism: The Center Plaza

The Center Plaza draws upon colour theory, modular economics, and Northeastern Chinese folk culture. Coloured PC (precast concrete) brick modules — chosen for economy, durability, and visual expression — became the medium for shaping place identity. Retail seating areas are defined by grids of modern order, while the dry fountain features bold black-and-yellow checkerboard patterns symbolising the rules and improvisations of urban life.

The most culturally specific element emerged from generative design. Using AI tools, we invoked Northeastern Chinese Shamanic window paper-cuts (chuānghuā) — a folk tradition rooted in rituals of gathering, dance, harvest, and celebration. Five AI-generated motifs, each representing communal life themes — reunion, dance, gift-giving, harvest, festivity — were translated into site-specific installations. The result is neither traditional nor futuristic, but a deliberate collision of the archaic and the new.

The Pointillism Bench

A meandering mosaic bench of countless multi-coloured tesserae functions as a “light vessel” within the plaza. Inspired by Neo-Impressionist pointillism — particularly Georges Seurat — the bench exploits mosaic’s optical properties: different facets catch and refract light as viewers move, producing shifting mineral luminosity. It translates the atmospheric quality of Seurat’s paintings into a tactile, three-dimensional public space experience.

Critical Reflections

The project’s most significant constraint became its most meaningful design generator. The original vision spanned 100,000+ m²; through cost optimisation, the realised scope was reduced to approximately 8,000 m². Rather than resist, we embraced this as a design condition — testing whether intensifying a very small canvas could produce outsized impact on community life.
One year after completion, the evidence is encouraging. Residents report that the plaza feels warmer in winter, that wind has softened, that sunlight lingers. Children play in the dry fountain. Elderly residents rest on the mosaic bench. The space has transitioned from a “frozen enclave” into what it should always have been: shared ground.
Renewal, in this case, was not about spectacle or addition. It was the quiet, radical act of removing obstacles to life, and trusting that a genuinely public space, once freed, would be animated by the people who use it.

Credits:
• Project: Shenyang CTG Vanke Town Center
• Location: Shenyang, China
• Client: Shenyang Vanke
• Landscape Art Direction & Concept: THLA (Tianhua Landscape Architecture)
• Landscape Design (Concept – Schematic): THLA — Jie Xu, Wenyi Chen, Mingzhu He, Kewei Xiong, Jun Li, Yusi Zheng, Liangliang Guo
• Construction Documentation: Shenyang Urban Landscape Engineering Co., Ltd.
• Landscape Contractor: Guangzhou Puyuan Landscape Co., Ltd.
• Photography: Chill Shine

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