E PLUS DESIGN Stacks a Chongqing Shopping Complex into a Terraced Hillside Beside Green Heart Park

Most shopping centers in China's expanding urban districts are built as sealed boxes. A parking podium sits below, an atrium sits in the middle, and the landscape is pushed to the margins. The Green Heart Commercial Complex and A4X Art Center at LUXERIVERS in Chongqing does the opposite. E PLUS DESIGN, working under its E+UV banner with lead architects Fu Li and Coco Zhou, has broken a 22,535 m² program of retail, dining, a bookstore and an exhibition venue into a cluster of stepped blocks. Those blocks climb out of the parkland in the Yuelai district like a small hill town.

The architects frame the scheme around the idea of "a boundless mountain city", and in this case the phrase describes the building fairly literally. Chongqing is a city of stairs, stilts and level changes, and the project uses that vertical habit as its organizing logic. The question we care about is whether a client-driven retail project for Wide Horizon can also work as public ground: somewhere you walk through, sit on and climb over without buying anything. Judging by the images, the answer is mostly yes.

A Mountain City Assembled from Pixels

From the air, the complex reads less like a building and more like a terraced landscape with rooms tucked into it. A curving road wraps the site, green hillsides frame it, and towers rise behind it in the haze. The stepped blocks fill the space between, dissolving the usual hard line between mall and park.

The massing is granular on purpose. Small volumes rise and fall across the plot, so no single facade dominates and the overall bulk breaks into a scale you can relate to on foot. That choice matters on a site next to Green Heart Park and the Luxi Lake ecological setting, where a monolithic retail block would have read as an intrusion.

Stepped Facades That Hold Their Own Gardens

Up close, the architecture is restrained: pale stone or concrete cubes, black-framed glass boxes, and glass balustrades that keep the terraces visually open. The facades are a backdrop for planting rather than the main event. Each setback becomes a balcony, and each balcony becomes a planter.

The palette works because it stays quiet. In low evening sun, the dark glass volumes take on the color of the sky and the trees, while the pale cubes catch the light. The building looks different at every hour, and the effect comes from orientation and depth rather than decoration.

Terraces as Topography

This is where the project earns its "park-integrated" label. Wide white stairs, concrete planter beds, lawns and young trees step down the site in a sequence that is part plaza and part hillside garden. Landscape design is by Z+T Studio. A local report counts more than 300 plant varieties on site, which suggests an ambition well beyond the usual decorative strip of shrubs.

The stairs do double duty. They are circulation, and they are also seating, viewing platforms and places to linger. The checkered paving and small embedded lights in the top-down dusk view show the terraces were designed for evening use, not only as a daytime image.

Atriums Planted from the Ground Up

Inside, the conventional mall atrium is reworked as an open-air or semi-open void with trees rising through it. Glass-railed stairs and bridges cross the space, and concrete columns carry stacked floors. Timber-screened balconies and lantern-like lamps warm what could otherwise feel like a parking structure.

The long wooden counter and communal table at the bottom of one atrium are the telling details. These are places to gather, not just thoroughfares to shop units. The white spiral stair works as a sculptural anchor, and the trees blur the edge between interior and garden. XU Studio led the commercial public space renovation, and A.ardon designed the community spaces, Sprouts Home and the bookstore courtyard.

Courtyards Cut into the Mass

Between the blocks, smaller courtyards give the complex a slower, more domestic register. A perforated weathering steel screen, a timber deck and slender trees turn one court into a stage for informal play. Another sets pines and gravel in front of a glazed café, with stacked concrete floors rising above.

These courts are what make the cluster permeable. Each void lets in light, air and greenery, and gives you somewhere to pause on the way through. The Green Heart Bookstore benefits most from this, gaining a courtyard rather than a corridor frontage.

Rooftops as a Second Ground Plane

The roofs carry on the terraced logic. Green roofs, pale paving and glass balustrades produce a walkable upper landscape, and a curving elevated bridge appears beyond the trees. Rippled fabric canopies and an ornate iron-framed hanging garden add looser, more theatrical moments to an otherwise disciplined grid.

At dusk the upper terraces turn into lounges, with pendant lights and woven benches looking out toward the glowing hills. Lighting is by Brandston Partnership, and HdA handled floodlighting for Green Heart Park. The evening images show that the two lighting schemes treat building and park as one nocturnal landscape.

Street Life at Dusk

The project's real test is whether people use it, and the photographs show plenty of them: seated on steps, dining beneath a timber-roofed canopy, and gathering under string lights on wet paving. A slatted timber pavilion with curved edges hovers over one plaza and adds a soft counterpoint to the rectilinear blocks.

Tree-lined walkways along the glass and panel facades keep the ground floor active. Shopfronts open onto shaded paths instead of an internal corridor, so retail behaves like a street. Trial operations began in May, and early images suggest the outdoor public realm is doing the work the architects intended.

The A4X Art Center as a Cultural Anchor

The A4X Art Center gives the complex a reason to exist beyond commerce. Its interiors, by TEKTONN ARCHITECTS, are bolder than the architecture around them: a purple mesh-lined staircase runs beside a saturated yellow wall hung with paintings. Giant pink hand sculptures and a flower-shaped lawn installation carry the programming outdoors.

We think this pairing is smart. The restrained shell lets the art and installations supply the color, and putting a cultural venue inside a retail cluster gives people a non-transactional reason to visit.

Plans and Drawings

The site analysis places the complex about 40 minutes from the city center and among a network of green parks. The massing studies and white physical models show how the team tested stepped volumes, circular forms and terraced landscape along the curved site before settling on the pixel-like cluster.

The sections are the most revealing drawings. Arrows trace airflow rising from the lake park up through the stepped volumes, which suggests the terracing is meant to support natural ventilation as well as views and planting. The wall detail shows a precast concrete frame module with glazing, explaining how such a granular massing could be built efficiently. One axonometric pairs the stacked-unit framework with photos of festivals, workshops and a bookshop, which makes the point that the grid is a framework for events.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese cities have built thousands of malls, and many now struggle to attract visitors. The Green Heart complex offers a credible alternative: break the program into small stepped pieces, give the terraces and roofs back to the public, and let landscape and art carry as much weight as retail. The terraced form follows Chongqing's own topography and stair culture, so the project feels rooted in its city rather than imported.

The project also shows what coordinated authorship can achieve. Architecture, landscape, planting, interiors and lighting came from many hands, yet the result reads as one terraced environment. For developers and designers working on suburban growth districts, the lesson is direct: if a commercial building gives people somewhere to sit, climb and gather, they are more likely to keep coming back.

Green Heart Commercial Complex & A4X Art Center by E PLUS DESIGN (E+UV), LUXERIVERS, Chongqing, China. Area: 22,535 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: DONG Image, Sheshe, PrismImage.

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