Breathing-scape: A Moss-Canopied Park in China That Treats Clean Air as a Shared Public Room

Most parks ask you to come outside and breathe. In a city where the air itself is the hazard, that invitation becomes a contradiction. Breathing-scape confronts it directly: instead of treating greenery as decoration around the edges of a smog problem, it makes the act of cleaning air the organising idea of the park. The result is a landscape where shade, water and a looping path are all asked to do environmental work.

Breathing-scape is the work of Jannatun Nayeem Nowshin, Farzana Haque, Naorin Tabassum Chowdhury and asif elahirocky, sited in China. The team frames it as a public space designed to emerge in the most polluted areas in the world, with the potential to tackle air pollution and to reinvent what a public park can be. The project was named Winner at Breathe Free.

A Single Loop Drawn Around Two Pools of Water

The plan reads as one continuous gesture. A broad pedestrian band coils through the site, wrapping two curved bodies of water and folding back on itself so that no part of the park becomes a dead end. Short green crossings stitch the loop across the water at several points, letting visitors cut through or extend their walk as they choose. The drawing labels this set of moves as Chinese traditional design elements, and the composition supports that reading: the path meanders rather than marches, and the water is held in soft, rounded basins rather than rectangular pools.

Inside the curl of the path sits a cluster of hexagonal canopies, packed tightly like a honeycomb. This is the park's densest and most deliberate zone, set against the open water on one side and the planted edges on the other. Placing the purification structures at the centre of the loop, rather than scattering them, means every route through the park eventually brushes past them.

Moss Canopies That Turn a Lawn into a Room

Underneath, those hexagons become something closer to architecture than landscape. Each canopy rises from a slender stem and flares into a broad, moss-covered umbrella, and together they form a continuous green ceiling over the lawn. The light that slips through the gaps between canopies falls in sharp strips across the grass, and the paved lines in the ground follow the same geometry, so the floor and roof feel drawn by one hand. The team's boards describe these as moss modules intended to draw pollutants out of the air, while the funnel shape is also shown channelling rainwater down the stem.

What makes the space convincing is how ordinary the activity under it looks. People sit on the grass, someone plays guitar, others stand and talk. The canopies are not presented as a technical installation to be viewed from a distance but as the shaded heart of the park's social life, which is exactly where a filtering structure should be if it is meant to serve the people breathing beneath it.

Timber Ribbons That Lift Planting Above the Trail

The loop is not only a ground-level path. At the entry, folded timber ribbons rise over the deck, carrying planting along their upper edges and dropping down to form benches and supports. They frame views toward the water and the canopy grove beyond, and they give the walk a sense of passing through thresholds rather than across an open plaza. A circular opening in a pale wall appears in the background, hinting at the gateways further in.

Further along, the trail splits its surface: pale boards for walking and running on one side, warm brick paving bleeding into a playground with swings on the other, and the moss canopies hovering just off the path. The arrangement lets runners, families and loiterers share the same corridor without competing for it, and it keeps the purification grove in constant peripheral view.

Moon Gates and Arch Bridges at the Water's Edge

Where the path meets the water, the vocabulary turns more explicitly traditional. A carved timber bridge leads toward a white wall pierced by a moon gate, with the canopy grove visible through and above it. On the lakeside deck, stepped arch bridges cross the pools in the distance, and low stone posts with slender rails edge the water. These are familiar elements of the Chinese garden, and here they serve a practical role: they slow movement down, mark arrival points and turn the crossings of the loop into small events.

The renderings also take care to populate these edges with older visitors, a reminder that a park in a polluted city is as much a refuge for those most vulnerable to bad air as it is a playground. The calm, open deck by the water, with seating posts and clear sightlines, reads as a place designed for lingering rather than passing through.

Why This Project Matters

Breathing-scape argues that the response to air pollution does not have to be a sealed building or a rooftop machine. It can be a public room, open to everyone, where the structures that clean the air are also the ones that offer shade, gather people and collect rain. By pulling those functions into a single canopy and placing it at the centre of a walkable loop, the team makes environmental infrastructure something people inhabit rather than something they overlook.

Its other lesson is cultural. Rather than importing a generic eco-park, the design leans on moon gates, arch bridges and meandering paths to make the new technology feel rooted in its place. That pairing of a contemporary environmental agenda with a familiar spatial language is what gives the proposal its confidence, and it offers a useful model for any city looking to reinvent its parks around the air its residents actually breathe.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Jannatun Nayeem Nowshin, Farzana Haque, Naorin Tabassum Chowdhury, asif elahirocky

Competition and award

Winner, Breathe Free

Location

China

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