Built Work: Swan Watching Café and Na Xiang Hai Beach Facility, Rongcheng, China Construction Completion: 2024 and 2019 respectively. Role: Architect. Collaborator: Rurban Studio, Shanghai, China.
Located on a lakeside near the ocean, where whooping swans migrate each winter from November to March, this café reimagines architecture as a continuous ground that dissolves the boundary between urban context and nature. Local residents have even adjusted their Chinese New Year celebrations to avoid disturbing the swans, underscoring a shared ethic of coexistence that informs the project.
Conceived as a lifted terrain, the café translates inhabitable space into stratified ground conditions. Its undulating roof echoes the surrounding landscape, while the interior evokes a subterranean space. Entry is staged as a tunnel-like threshold that mediates the transition from exterior to interior, from landscape to constructed space. The undulations of the roof, together with the calibrated sequence of spatial compression and expansion, evoke a choreography of approach and retreat, an embodied negotiation akin to the tentative, reciprocal gestures between humans and swans.