Unlike other hospitality projects, this project is located at Jiangxin Island, an iconic landmark for Wenzhou. It’s a place where over 800 Chinese poems were created here and a place that served as the beacon for maritime trade for over 1000 years with twin towers on the island. These natural, cultural, and economical legacies pose a unique challenge to design an art hotel that could speak to the legacies and future. What should the image of the island’s future be? How should we rebuild the poetic experience for it without sacrificing the natural environment?

Different from the hotels in the “concrete forest”. It blends into nature as a series of small masses surrounded by landscape. The topography of the site is manipulated to respond to the pattern of the mountain and water, while the buildings sit on the mounts, recalling the relationship between the towers and the island. Various viewing perspectives are created because of the rotation of massing, making the view of the city and nature come into the site. The corners are pushed and pulled to not only smooth the volume and space but also recall the sail movements. With the insertion of the art gallery and the undulating topography/water ponds that connect the ground floor and above, interior hotel programs and exterior public spaces are docked around the core art space, creating an art/landscape/view-based multilevel poetic experience for visitors. Meanwhile, this approach builds an effective ecological resilience system for the site without disturbing the existing natural environment.

Inspired by traditional Chinese gardening, the path between the drop-off and the lobby is elongated to make the guest go through the poetic bamboo forest as an arrival experience. The view range changes from narrow to wide.

The architecture is no longer independent of nature but embedded in it. It merges into the mountains, water, and poems represented by Jiangxin Island, becoming a Shanshui painting with misty rain.