Located in the heart of Yiwu, Greentown Fengqi Yilu explores how landscape can create a secluded, emotionally restorative living environment in one of the city’s most active urban districts. Rather than treating retreat as an escape from urban life, the project redefines it as a gradual transition from the public city into an immersive residential garden.
Inspired by the philosophy of Yilu—a return to nature, simplicity, and authenticity—the design reinterprets the spatial language of traditional Chinese gardens for contemporary living. Along a 200-metre urban frontage, the landscape retreats from the street edge to establish a layered threshold composed of woodland planting, topography, and garden walls. Instead of relying on a singular boundary, the landscape gently filters views, sound, and movement, allowing architecture to emerge gradually from a mountain-like setting.
A dramatic ten-metre level difference becomes the foundation of the project’s three-dimensional spatial framework. Rather than flattening the terrain, the design transforms it into a sequence of elevated gardens, sunken courtyards, terraces, and interconnected interior spaces. Public functions occupy higher levels with expansive garden views, while quieter spaces are embedded within the landscape below, creating a rich spatial rhythm of openness and enclosure, prospect and refuge.
Water serves as the project’s central spatial and emotional thread. Flowing through gardens before gathering at the sunken Lotus Lake, it changes in sound, scale, and character while connecting a series of carefully composed garden scenes. Four framed landscape windows overlook layered seasonal planting, where evergreen woodland, maples, red pines, moss, and flowering species create an evolving landscape throughout the year. Every movement through the site reveals a new relationship between water, planting, architecture, and light.
More than a residential landscape, Fengqi Yilu demonstrates how timeless Chinese garden principles can be reinterpreted within a contemporary urban condition. Through topographic depth, immersive spatial sequencing, and restrained material expression, the project creates an urban sanctuary where landscape leads the experience, architecture recedes into nature, and everyday life is reconnected with the changing rhythms of the seasons.
Greentown Yiwu · Fengqi Yilu Residence
Landscape Architect: Change Studio
Photography: Wang Ning
Text: Change Studio
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