The Challenge: A Community Threshold Severed by Infrastructure

The site sits at the southern gateway of Luxelakes Eco-City, Chengdu — the only public corridor connecting the east and west communities. But it was broken by roads, fire lanes, and building edges. A dark traffic underpass ran through its heart, leaving a fragmented space that residents passed through but never stayed in.
Luxelakes is one of Chengdu’s largest ecological communities, home to tens of thousands. This corridor is their daily route home — yet it had never become a place to pause. That gap drove the design.

Strategy: Three Moves, One Circle

Three strategies reorganized the site: Connect — reuniting severed spaces via a sunken park; Focus — turning the dark underpass into an artistic anchor; Extend — pushing building-edge spaces outward into a continuous activity platform.
Above these, one form holds them together: a circle. Subtraction. All complexity resolved into the simplest geometry. The circle is both order and attitude — a return to community, daily life, and human scale. Like Apple’s Home button, it transforms site chaos into clear spatial language.
The ring creates two distinct yet interwoven characters. Inside: emptiness. A pure spiritual space — an emotional threshold from city noise to community calm. A place to breathe, to clear the mind, to simply be. Outside: vitality. A former fire lane reborn as a layered platform of daily life, lined with zelkova trees. People buy plants, share coffee, watch light play in water. Different things happen every day.
The ring itself is a journey. Graduated step widths slow your pace. Edges are deliberately undefined — the ring is also a bench, a ramp also a slide. The absence of program is the program.

Luxelakes Wing: A Gateway Across Time

At the core, the existing underpass was both challenge and opportunity. We introduced a 20-metre-high steel structure — Luxelakes Wing — marking the symbolic entrance between neighbourhoods.
The concept holds two tensions: exterior speaks technology, interior speaks antiquity. The steel portal unfolds like wings — a luminous, featherweight volume expressing a forward-facing technological language. Inside, the artist wrapped the space in kraft paper, creating a cave-like interior of primal warmth — sheltering, sensory, alive.
This juxtaposition is a statement: technology exists so humans may dwell more poetically. A hard-edged structure becomes the community’s tender spiritual anchor; cold engineering logic ultimately shelters the soul.
The structure, designed with T&D, uses the steel frame as its own finish — no cladding. Fabricated via Robotic Plus’s digital manufacturing: precision components, real-time stress monitoring, achieving a smooth large-span finish.

Zen: A Buffer for the Urban Everyday

The design’s deepest ambition addresses the mental state of urban life. A healthy city needs more than commercial and transit spaces. It needs blank spaces — where one’s state can change in an instant. Not a remote monastery. A negative space — to sit alone or quietly beside a neighbour.
The planting enacts this philosophy. Rejecting manicured artifice, the design uses native naturalism: perennials and scattered stones where wildness and refinement coexist. Unlike the Japanese Zen garden’s pursuit of eternal stillness, this park preserves natural cycles. Grasses and salvias are left uncut through autumn and winter; the garden changes with the seasons — truly coexisting with time. Soft pink veronicastrum, blue-violet African sage, warm gold grasses compose a shifting natural narrative across the seasons.
As Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance explores: true Quality is found in full immersion, where self and work dissolve into flow. The making of this project was that search.

Client：Wide Horizon
Landscape Design： THLA Tianhua Landscape
Structure Consultant：T&D
Structure Manufacturing & Implementation：RoboticPlus.TECH
Underpass Art Installation：Huayunda
Plant Consultant / Construction：Flower Boarder Qianshan
Architecture Design：10DESIGN/DCM/SWI/HPA
Commercial Installation：NEME Studio Architects
Signage Consultant：C40
Lighting Consultant：Songer
Photography：Qian Shen Photography, Chill Shine, Chengdu Color, Zhiqiang Zeng, Ge Mao

30.445722, 104.058131 Jiazhou Rd.,Luxelakes Eco-City, Chengdu, Sichuan, China