DoDesign Shelters a Chongqing Buddha Shrine Inside Walls of Loose Cedar Logs That Visitors Can Rearrange

Little Nanhai is a turtle-shaped island where the Tiaodeng River meets the Yangtze in Chongqing's Dadukou District. During the Tang and Song dynasties it held a temple to Nanhai Guanyin. Centuries later, a Ming-dynasty Buddhist shrine was found on a wooded hill near Nanhai Village. The site's owner marked it with a Buddha carved into a large crape myrtle trunk, and the sculpture became a local pilgrimage stop. For years it sat under a makeshift shed that kept out neither sun nor rain. DoDesign, led by Shiyang Chen, Ruoyun Xu and Zhengmeng Dong, was asked to replace it, and the result is the 325 m² Nanhai Buddha Pavilion.

The interesting part is what the studio chose not to build. There is no raised plinth, no tiered roof and no ceremonial axis that announces sacred ground. You get black steel columns, a flat gridded timber roof, and freestanding walls of welded steel rod filled with cut cedar logs. The studio produced about 4,000 logs, installed roughly half of them and left the rest for visitors to slot in or move around. That makes the walls an ongoing collective act rather than a fixed enclosure, and we think it is a sharp answer to the question of how a small rural shrine can hold both devotion and everyday life.

A Thin Roof on a Cliff Above the Yangtze

The pavilion sits on a cliff edge among bamboo and camphor trees, with the Yangtze below and the Yunzhuan Mountains in the haze beyond. Seen from across the valley, it barely registers. The roof shows up as a single dark line, sometimes catching light, and the walls sink back into the green. That restraint matters on a site with a thousand-year religious history. The building does not compete with the hill; it settles into it.

Up close, the profile stays just as quiet. There are no eaves to speak of and no visible base, only a horizontal plane held on slender columns, with the log-filled cages reading as solid mass below. The flat roof is the right call here. A pitched or curved form would have pulled the building toward temple imagery, and the brief explicitly turned away from that.

Roof, Skylights and a Controlled Light

The gridded timber roof does the shelter work the old shed could not. Skylights sit at the center and along the perimeter, so daylight reaches the interior without striking the shrine directly or letting rain onto it. From above, you can see how the openings break the roof into a field of light wells instead of one big oculus. It is a practical response to sun and weather that also produces the most atmospheric moments in the photographs: dappled floors, soft overhead glow, long evening shadows under the deep plane.

The roof is also thin enough that a person can stand on it, as one image shows. That sense of lightness helps the pavilion feel more like a canopy pulled over a clearing than a room built around an idol.

Steel Cages, Cedar Ends

The walls are the project's main idea. Each one is a welded grid of black steel rod, freestanding and independent of the roof structure, with cedar logs pushed into the cells end-first. The columns carry the roof; the walls only divide space and filter light. Separating the two lets the walls stay porous and changeable without risk to the building's stability.

Against a low sun, the cages turn into screens of round silhouettes, each log end a small disc of shadow or glow. The cedar is left to weather, so over time the warm cut faces will grey and crack. That aging is part of the plan, and it suits a material system that was never meant to look finished.

A Wall That Keeps Being Built

The construction images show workers kneeling and climbing stepladders to slide logs into the grid one at a time. It is slow, manual, almost devotional work, and the studio has deliberately left half of it unfinished. With about 2,000 spare logs on site, visitors can add, remove or reposition pieces, so the density and pattern of every wall shift with use.

We find this more convincing than most participatory gestures in architecture, which often stop at a ribbon-cutting workshop. Here participation is built into the physical system. Placing a log becomes a small offering, comparable to lighting incense or stacking stones on a mountain path, and the building records those acts in its walls.

Moving the Buddha Into Its New Home

The archival collages show the crape myrtle trunk being carved, then lifted by crane and truck and set beneath the new steel roof. The gnarled mass of the timber sculpture contrasts with the pavilion's strict grid, and the architecture is better for it. The building supplies order and shelter; the sculpture supplies the irregular, living form that draws pilgrims.

In daylight, the carved figure stands at the center of an open plan, approached on level ground rather than up a stair. Visitors meet it face to face. That flattening of hierarchy is the clearest expression of the brief's refusal to monumentalize.

Devotion and Daily Life Under One Roof

The plan is organized around the Buddha, with the grid walls carving out shaded zones for circulation, pause and prayer. In one frame a worker stacks wood a few meters from a carved figure; in another a visitor kneels on a stone platform between log ends and the root sculpture, with the hills open behind. The two activities share the same space without conflict, which is exactly what the studio set out to achieve.

Small details keep the sacred present without staging it. A carved Buddha relief is set into a field of log ends, framed by the grid rather than placed on an altar. The wall becomes a niche without any special construction.

Fragments of an Older Site

Stone lions and carved fragments sit on dark platforms between the cages, a reminder that this hill has been layered with religious objects for centuries. The pavilion does not try to curate them into a museum display. They simply occupy the floor alongside the logs, glimpsed through the gaps in the walls.

Where log ends throw shadows onto a glass floor panel below, the building shows its willingness to expose what lies beneath it, both the ground and, by extension, the history of the site.

Plans and Drawings

The sections show how lightly the pavilion meets the cliff: slender supports step down the slope, and the floor plate cantilevers over rocky ground so the hillside largely stays intact. The site plan clarifies the logic of the interior, a rectangular column grid with the sculpture plinth at its heart and freestanding screens arranged around it, all set among existing trees drawn in on the contours.

Why This Project Matters

Small rural shrines in China are often either neglected or rebuilt as pastiche temples. The Nanhai Buddha Pavilion offers a third path. DoDesign uses an ordinary kit of steel columns, a timber roof and cut logs to solve a real problem, protecting a sculpture from sun and rain, while giving the community an active role in shaping the building. The sacred status of the site comes from use and memory, not from ornament.

The loose-fit log walls are the lesson to take away. By leaving the building literally incomplete, the architects turn maintenance, weathering and visitor participation into the design itself. For any small public or religious structure with a modest budget and a strong local following, that is a model worth studying: build the frame well, then let people finish it.

Nanhai Buddha Pavilion by DoDesign (lead architects Shiyang Chen, Ruoyun Xu and Zhengmeng Dong). Location: Little Nanhai, Dadukou District, Chongqing, China. Area: 325 m². Year: 2026. Photography: DoDesign.

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