The commission arrived through a competition. The municipality of Jingshan, in Hangzhou, had decided to mark fifteen points along a tea cultivation landscape with as many small buildings — pavilions, shelters, observation points — forming a route that would connect the territory without interrupting it.
We were asked to design one of them.
The brief was simple to state and difficult to resolve: a structure that belongs to a landscape without dissolving into it, that offers orientation without becoming a monument, that resists the rain and the humidity and the light of the Zhejiang seasons without requiring constant maintenance.
What the brief did not say, but what became immediately clear, was that the real challenge was scale. Each pavilion had to feel complete on its own — a finished architectural gesture — while remaining secondary to the route as a whole. Fifteen buildings, none of which could be the main one.
Our approach began with the ground. In this kind of landscape, the relationship between a building and its site is not established at the level of the façade or the roof: it is established at the level of the foundation, at the precise point where the structure touches the earth. Get that relationship right and the building finds its place. Get it wrong and nothing else resolves it.
The form we developed works as a compressed section: two thick walls, a roof that reads as a single plane, and between them a space that frames a specific view of the tea rows descending toward the valley. The materials are local stone and weathered timber — not because we were required to use them, but because the landscape has been shaped by exactly these materials over centuries, and anything else would have been a claim for attention the building doesn’t need to make.
The building is currently under construction. Completion is expected by mid 2026.
