On June 11, 2020, Sunac and Dexin, two leading companies, secured a rare residential land parcel in Wenzhou’s Binjiang Business District for a record high price of 3.6 billion yuan. This deal may set a new benchmark for residential land prices in Wenzhou in nearly a decade. Situated in the heart of the city’s CBD, the project is positioned as a TOP series high-end development. Leveraging the expertise of line+team in luxury housing, we are honored to serve as the planning and design team. Our goal is to outshine competing luxury residences nearby through meticulous design focused on product research and the living environment.
The Zhejiang Provincial Government has introduced the “Creating Communities, Creating Life” concept, aiming to pioneer a new model of high-quality urban development. This initiative covers nine urban residential functional units, each guided by distinct life scenarios. Our site falls within the Wenzhou Future Community area and is tasked with establishing two future community scenarios: the “Future Creation Living Room” and the “Future Childcare Center.” While the future community concept is promising, implementing it poses significant challenges amid many uncertainties, demanding effective communication between architects and government departments.
With prior experience designing future communities, Line+ understands the inevitable differences between government and developers due to their distinct perspectives. Inspired by Singapore’s Garden City, the government envisions communities that address the entire life cycle of residents, driving future lifestyle transformations through urban public spaces, neighborhood interaction, three-dimensional greenery, and aerial corridors. Conversely, developers prioritize standardized benefits and maximizing product value without increasing operational costs or compromising market appeal.
To reconcile these divergent demands, we adopted a balanced approach, implementing four innovative strategies that resolved apparent conflicts. Our design has earned high praise from government officials, property owners, and the market alike, resulting in sales values and turnover rates exceeding expectations.
Contradiction 01
The government prioritizes future community scenarios,
while developers emphasize sales demonstration zones.
Who truly takes precedence?
3D Scene Overlay, Resource Integration, and Sharing
In commercial real estate, the placement of buildings on the site represents a strategic balance of value and interests, critically impacting sales potential. Therefore, the overall planning and layout must be carefully considered.
The site borders urban roads on the west and south, with permitted access points. Due to road intersections, the available frontage is less than one-third of the plot boundary. Under these constraints, we had to accommodate primary and secondary residential entrances, kindergarten access, two future community facility entrances, and a large sales demonstration area as required by the owner.
While the government emphasizes the public nature of future community spaces, developers prioritize sales demonstration areas and community entrances from a market standpoint. To maximize the limited site conditions and reconcile these demands, we moved beyond traditional 2D layouts, proposing an innovative general plan featuring “scene overlay” and “space replacement.”
Analysis of overall plan evolution
In the final layout, entrances to future community support buildings are aligned with the community’s secondary entrances, leveraging different construction timelines. Early on, the building serves as a sales display center, while the kindergarten land functions as a marketing demo and model house area. This reuse and functional juxtaposition of land parcels satisfies sales display needs, street-facing requirements, and provides independent, open spaces for future community facilities, enabling unique images and flexible layouts.
“Scene overlay” between the sales display center and future community facilities
To mitigate the impact of high-rise buildings on the western residential area and foster interaction between public buildings and the city, low-rise public support buildings are located on the southwest side, facing the city road. The main residential entrance is positioned on the southern edge. Future community functions (Future Creation Living Room and Childcare Center) are integrated with the kindergarten, surrounding and complementing each other while sharing outdoor activity spaces.
These design choices maximize public resource integration and urban openness by allocating roughly 5% of public building capacity to nearly 20% of land area and 50% of street frontage. The main residential entrances align with north-south pedestrian flows, avoiding road impacts on northern buildings while creating a ceremonial landscape axis. Through strategic resource reuse and allocation, land and community interests are balanced, sharing valuable spatial resources.
Contradiction 02
Where should investments be focused?
Sales office? Park lobby?
Or the future community scenarios?
Three-in-One Micro Complex with Time-Slot Switching
The sales display center, future community facilities, and entrance lobby all demand prominent public presence and signage, requiring significant investment for high-quality facades. Traditional podium-style high-rise supporting facilities no longer meet government standards for public community buildings.
We integrated the three functions into a single building, designed with spatial versatility to switch functions at different times. This consolidation amplifies the group’s urban presence, resembling a micro complex. It also reduces facade costs significantly, meeting high-quality appearance standards for all three uses with a single investment.
To distinguish these public facilities from dignified residential buildings and highlight their inclusive, open, and expressive character, the architecture features smooth curves. This creates a futuristic, floating visual impact.
The form consists of two overlapping curves: one gently slopes to the ground with a slight inward tilt, featuring large glass surfaces that foster transparency and openness toward the urban interface; the other floats ten meters above, facing Yangfu Mountain, clad in aluminum panels and glass, evoking lightness and fluidity.
The intertwined curves symbolically form the Chinese character for “person.” Contrasting materials between the upper and lower parts create a striking visual impact and distinctive character, injecting a futuristic flair into the cityscape.
Two-story suspended building design
The two-story building in the demonstration zone initially served as a sales center before being repurposed as a future creative living room, childcare center, and community property management office. Functional versatility was carefully integrated into the graphic layout design.
The use of glass, aluminum panels, and imitation stone PC bricks creates a diverse architectural expression responding to different environmental interfaces. Floor-to-ceiling transparent glass is used on the southern and street-facing ground floors to maximize sunlight and visibility. The northern second-floor facade features rhythmic prefabricated aluminum panels, offering a lively architectural expression while minimizing visual impact on neighboring residences. Extensive green roofing extends the park’s landscape upwards, providing an ecological “fifth facade.”
Schematic of aluminum panel shapes and control parameters
Analysis of aluminum panel shape variations
To create a pure, futuristic architectural atmosphere, the design adopts minimalist construction and detailing. All visible aluminum panel joints are treated with natural openings or grooves to maintain building purity, avoiding curtain wall adhesive joints. Instead of conventional splicing at eaves, the ends of two aluminum panels are polished and seamlessly joined, creating a flawless large aluminum surface that enhances the building’s refined aesthetic.
Aluminum panel end details
Contradiction 03
How to incorporate window wall systems
to achieve public building facade effects?
How to maintain facade appearance without sacrificing aesthetics
while realizing aerial gardens?
Ultimate Full-Glass Screens with Suspended Sky Gardens
Both government and developers value public facades for residential buildings. However, due to regulations, residential buildings cannot adopt glass curtain walls like public buildings, resulting in a lower overall appearance and quality.
To achieve a public housing facade, we carefully designed facade nodes, moving beyond fixed external windows on beams. Windows are supported by slim 100mm-thick concrete cantilever slabs, with the exterior decorated by shuttle-shaped and grooved aluminum alloy lines. The line ends are finely detailed at a 15mm scale, creating the appearance of a glass curtain wall using a door and window system. The structural elements are hidden, delivering the effect of a large glass surface building with exquisite detailing.
Public building facade effect
Bay window detail nodes
The facade features abundant cold grey glass and aluminum panels, complemented by champagne gold panels and lines that add warmth to the cool architectural tone, creating a light luxury, inviting aesthetic.
Sky gardens are a hallmark of future communities and a government-mandated design focus. Developers see them as a way to enhance living quality but worry about their impact on facade integrity and appearance quality. Balancing aerial gardens with distinctive facades presents a major design challenge.
Using a wide but shallow layout, we concentrated sky gardens on the building’s south side, integrating them with balconies. This facilitates plant maintenance and significantly expands living and leisure space, enhancing residents’ quality of life. The sky garden is recessed 300mm into the balcony foundation to create a soil bed, with ceiling treatments ensuring consistency and a unified formal language that preserves building integrity and enriches the horizontal architectural rhythm.
Sky Garden Node
The combination of sky gardens and balconies breaks conventional limitations on balcony size, greatly expanding outdoor leisure areas. The wide glass railings protrude from both sides, creating the visual impression of gardens and balconies floating outside the main building, delivering a light and transparent facade effect.
Hanging aerial gardens on the facade
Typical building floor plan
A section of the roof rises with golden inward-tilted lines that effectively screen rooftop equipment, creating a delicate, transparent, and distinctive architectural crown. This unique roof symbolizes the “Crown of Wenzhou,” reflecting the project’s ambition to become a city landmark.
Contradiction 04
Underground clubhouses add to land costs,
Doing it means losses; not doing it means lacking luxury.
“Openable” Glass Roof Enables Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Space Transition
In luxury residential markets, including a clubhouse with a heated swimming pool is a key selling point. To preserve sales value, clubhouses are typically underground and excluded from plot ratio calculations. However, local regulations require paying land transfer fees for non-garage underground areas based on above-ground land prices. This high cost deters developers, resulting in few high-end underground clubhouses locally. Line+ addresses this conflict by balancing economic viability and spatial quality through innovative design.
Underground clubhouse floor plan
Glass roof opening and closing mechanism
The design integrates the underground swimming pool with a sunken courtyard, eliminating the usual issues of underground spaces. A mechanically operable glass roof covers the courtyard, providing safety, natural light, and ventilation to the underground clubhouse. This innovative approach delivers significant benefits at reduced cost, enabling high-quality underground clubhouses to thrive locally. The retractable roof and glass-topped pool have become key project highlights that energize the market.
Underground clubhouse section diagram
The design breathes life into the architecture as the opening and closing of the glass roof reflect the flow of time, telling a story of rapid change and transformation.
Summary
There is always a solution,
no challenge is insurmountable.
China’s rapid urbanization demands architects carefully balance the needs of government, developers, buyers, and themselves within tight timelines. This requires grounded strategies and flexible approaches.
Through thoughtful planning and layout, striking public facades, high-quality underground clubhouses, and micro complexes with overlapping scenes, Line+ unlocks the site’s potential. Our designs highlight the community, invigorate the city, and balance capital returns with public interest.
Fast project cycles are essential under high-turnover real estate models. Many projects compress design timelines without recognizing that timely government approvals significantly influence milestones and reduce costs. This project’s design phases received unanimous praise and rapid approvals from government agencies. Effective design not only delivers high-quality products but also buys time and creates value for owners.
The market is the ultimate test for any product. Upon launch, this project achieved over 90% initial sales, raising approximately 1.58 billion yuan and igniting the Wenzhou property market. Its popularity and sales prices surpassed all competing luxury developments in the area.
As an innovative architectural firm, Line+ has consistently embraced the core strategy of “space empowerment.” We address urban and rural challenges relevant to today’s context, enabling architecture to unlock value across social, economic, and cultural dimensions. Leveraging the future community initiative, we enhance sales premiums through innovative product design, enliven the city through architectural connectivity, and explore new possibilities for future community creation amid urban modernization.
Project Information
Project Name: Rongchuang Dexin · Jiangshan Yunqi
Location: Wenzhou, Zhejiang
Design Firm: Line+ Architectural Firm gad
Lead Architect / Project Creator: Meng Fanhao
Design Team: Miao Chunle, Tao Tao, Zhu Min, Zhang Hanqi, Li Sanjian, Xing Shu, Zhu Xiaojing, Wang Xiaokun, Yuan Han
Building Area: 136,000 square meters
Design Period: June 2020 to November 2020
Owners: Rongchuang Group, Dexin Group
Landscape Design: ASPECT Studios
Interior Design: Seamless Design (Demonstration Zone) / CCD (Model Room) / Hangzhou Yihe (Region)
Construction Drawing Development: Zhejiang Natural Architecture Design Co., Ltd
Curtain Wall Coordination: Wanshi Building Decoration Co., Ltd
Materials: Aluminum panels, glass, imitation stone PC bricks
Demonstration Zone Photography: Chen Xi
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