gad Wraps a Miniature Old Town onto the Rooftop of a Waterfront Complex in Zhejiang

Where the Xu River meets the Luxi Canal in the heart of Jiangshan, Zhejiang Province, a triangular waterfront parcel has spent decades caught between historic fabric and modern traffic infrastructure. Century-old sycamore trees still line the streets; fragments of ancient city wall ruins still anchor the east edge. But the site itself was fractured, sliced apart by roads and a channelized canal. gad, with lead architect Wu Xuan Architectural, took on the task of reconstituting this ground into a public destination, one that stitches neighborhood center, retail, hospitality, and urban plaza into 21,810 square meters of terraced, low-rise architecture.

What makes the project genuinely worth studying is not its mixed-use program, which is conventional enough, but the way the building gives more space to the city than it claims for itself. Volumes pull back behind tree canopies and root zones so that none of the old sycamores are sacrificed. The rooftop of the second-level hotel volume becomes a publicly accessible ring-shaped platform housing a 1:10 scale model of old Jiangshan, a "miniature old town" open around the clock. The building is, in a sense, a constructed landscape that lowers itself beneath the treeline and then offers its own back as a terrace.

A City Wall in Stone

The facade system is modular, composed of grey stone courses laid in three thickness variations that evoke the stratified masonry of Jiangshan's ancient city wall. It's not a literal reconstruction. The horizontal bands are precise, machine-cut, and clearly contemporary, but their proportional rhythm carries the memory of defensive walls that once defined the city's perimeter. Deep overhangs and recessed lighting at the upper tiers give the mass a floating quality at dusk, softening what could easily read as fortress-like.

At street level, the stone base anchors the building to its urban context. Cantilevered roof planes extend outward, creating sheltered thresholds and entry courts that invite pedestrians in rather than directing them around. The horizontal emphasis is relentless, but deliberately so: it reads as landscape, not tower.

Trees First, Volumes Second

The most telling design decision was made before any form was drawn. Building volumes were required to retreat beyond both the canopy spread and the root protection zones of the site's century-old sycamores. This constraint, treated as non-negotiable, generated the plan's fragmented footprint: pavilions and terraces orbit the trees rather than the other way around. The result is an architecture that feels embedded within an existing grove, even though the landscape has been carefully recomposed.

A covered timber deck walkway threads between glass pavilions and birch plantings, offering a secondary circulation network that moves at a gentler pace than the surrounding streets. Outdoor cafe seating settles beneath the tree canopy in a gesture that is both programmatic and ecological: shade replaces air conditioning, and public life is drawn outward.

The Terraced Roof as Public Ground

gad treats the roofscape as the project's most important public space. Stepped volumes cascade down toward the water, creating a series of planted terraces, reflecting pools, and open-air plazas that are accessible by exterior stairs. The ring-shaped platform atop the hotel volume is the crown of this sequence, housing the miniature model of old Jiangshan. It functions simultaneously as a viewing platform, a cultural artifact, and a civic destination.

The terraces face southwest toward distant mountains, a panorama that the low-rise massing deliberately keeps open. Cantilevered roof planes frame views without blocking them, and glass railings maintain visual continuity between levels. At dusk, the green roofs and planted platforms register as a soft topography rather than a hard building edge, blurring the line between constructed and natural ground.

Reviving the Canal Edge

The Luxi Canal, once a utilitarian channel severed from its surroundings by road infrastructure, has been revitalized into a waterside commercial street. The building's lowest volumes step down toward its edge, with tiered metal roofs and stone bases that create a visual dialogue with the water. People still wash clothes at the canal's edge, a scene of domestic routine that the architecture accommodates rather than sanitizes.

A red arched pedestrian bridge spans the river nearby, connecting the development to neighborhoods on the opposite bank. The aerial views at sunset reveal the full scope of the strategy: a low, green-roofed complex that hugs the river confluence, opening its terraces to the water and sky rather than turning inward. The massing is deliberately modest, staying below the treeline and deferring to the broader landscape.

Layered Canopies and Thresholds

Seen from below, the stacked cantilevered roof planes create a stratigraphy of shelter. Recessed lighting strips emphasize the underside of each layer, transforming the overhangs into luminous horizontal bands at night. The effect is simultaneously monumental and intimate: the building reads as a geological formation when viewed from the street, but at close range the canopies define human-scaled thresholds and covered walkways.

The slatted timber canopy along the deck walkway introduces a softer material register that contrasts with the dominant grey stone. Birch trees push through openings in the decking, reinforcing the idea that the building is porous rather than sealed. Every threshold is a negotiation between inside and outside, between controlled environment and open air.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan sequence makes visible the project's phased development strategy across a triangular waterfront parcel. Three pavilion clusters are positioned to preserve existing trees (marked in grey on the site drawing) and to maintain clear sightlines to the river edge. The section drawing is the most revealing: it shows how the stepped volumes cascade down a slope, with underground parking buried beneath planted terraces, keeping the surface entirely pedestrian.

The elevation detail of the facade's horizontal stone courses, annotated with three thickness dimensions, confirms the modular logic behind the city-wall motif. The circulation diagram, with its red and blue pedestrian flow arrows, maps how the scheme reconnects fragmented neighborhood zones to the waterfront. Floor plans show interconnected blocks arranged along a central pedestrian spine, a layout that prioritizes through-movement over cul-de-sac retail pods.

Why This Project Matters

Jiangshan Tonglumen Urban Terrace succeeds because it treats restraint as a design principle rather than a limitation. The decision to subordinate building mass to existing trees, to keep heights below the canopy line, and to surrender the rooftop to public use reflects a rare willingness to let the city benefit from the building's surface area. In a development climate that routinely maximizes floor-to-area ratios, gad's scheme gives ground back, literally and figuratively.

The miniature old town on the rooftop is the project's most provocative gesture. It's a model of what was lost, displayed on top of what has been built, accessible to anyone at any hour. It converts nostalgia into a spatial experience and turns a hotel roof into a civic commons. Whether this idea will resonate with residents over the long term remains to be seen, but as a proposition about what waterfront development could be in Chinese provincial cities, it deserves serious attention.

Jiangshan Tonglumen Urban Terrace by gad with lead architect Wu Xuan Architectural. Quzhou, China. 21,810 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Chen Xi Studio.

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