IwamotoScott Lands a Three-Winged Steel Pavilion and Lookout Tower on the Rural Edge of Chengdu's Future City

On the outskirts of Chengdu, where crop fields and wooded hillocks still outnumber cranes, IwamotoScott Architecture has completed a 3,000 m² exhibition pavilion for Chengdu High Tech Investment Group, the state-owned developer behind a 1,200-acre district masterplanned by OMA and gmp. Commissioned in summer 2020 and finished in 2025, the building is an information and learning center, an exhibition hall and a gateway marker for a city that does not yet exist. The brief asked for something decidedly future-facing, and the San Francisco studio of Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott answered with three intersecting triangular volumes wrapped in a lofted skin of tessellated stainless-steel panels, paired with a twisting lookout tower.

What makes the project worth your attention is not the shimmer of the metal. Gateway pavilions for new districts tend toward the generic, so the interesting question is what this one is actually pointed at. Each of the three wings aims at a specific piece of the changing landscape: Tianfu International Airport to the east, Chengdu Future Science and Technology City to the south and Jiangxi River Park to the west. Where the wings collide, the architects carve out a central atrium they describe as a translation of the traditional courtyard. That combination of a view-driven exterior and an inward-looking core is the idea worth unpacking.

A Gateway Read at Highway Speed

The pavilion is sited to be seen from the new highway, and the aerial and bridge-side views make clear why the roof does most of the work. From above or from a moving car, the building reads as a scaled, faceted landform rather than a box with a facade. The white arched bridge in the foreground of several shots is a useful foil: one piece of infrastructure is all repetition and clean curvature, the other all fragmentation and folding.

The architects relate the form to the fractal character of the surrounding hillocks, and the view across the crop field supports the claim more than you might expect. At distance, the tessellated skin breaks the mass into small units that echo the texture of the wooded ridge. It is not camouflage, it is clearly a made object, but it borrows the grain of its terrain rather than ignoring it.

Pavilion and Tower as a Pair

The lookout tower is not an afterthought. Its form is derived from the pavilion's and rotated into a complementary position in plan, so the two read as a related set when seen from the road. The tower's diagonal lattice skin twists as it rises and terminates in an open, gold-lined viewing deck, a small piece of theater that gives visitors a reason to walk out through the landscape.

We think the pairing is the smartest urban move here. A single object on a hill is a sculpture; two related objects set up a distance between them, and that distance becomes a territory. In a district still mostly under construction, the pavilion and tower stake out a public landscape before the surrounding blocks arrive to define it.

Lifted Wings and Cantilevers

Each wing lifts off the ground and cantilevers toward its assigned view, with a ribbon of glazing tucked under the folded metal roof. The undersides are treated as surfaces in their own right: diamond-patterned soffits and gold-toned bands catch low sun and evening light, so the overhangs glow rather than read as shadowed bellies. That warm material shift is a good counterweight to the cool grey of the steel scales above.

Apertures along the lofted roof surfaces pull bands of daylight into the primary spaces, and smaller localized openings in the skin mediate between inside and out. The result is a shell that looks hermetic from a distance but is perforated with intent up close, a detail that matters for a building meant to frame views rather than block them.

The Breezeway and Entrance Plaza

Lifting the ground floor produces a covered breezeway that leads you to the entrance, a practical response to Chengdu's humid climate and a sensible way to give arrival some compression before release. The forecourt of long striped stone pavers works as a directional ground plane, drawing you under the overhanging metal volumes toward the blue glazing of the lobby.

At ground level the program is deliberately public and casual: lobby, café and meeting rooms, with the café opening onto a terrace on the southwest side. Keeping the everyday uses low and permeable, and pushing the exhibition upstairs, means the building can function as a place to stop and sit rather than only a showroom for a future district.

The Grand Stair

A broad stair with timber treads and timber-capped handrails connects the lobby to the main exhibition hall on the second level. Against the white faceted walls and polished floor, the timber is the only warm, touchable material in view, and it lands exactly where your hands and feet meet the building. Looking up, the triangulated steel lattice ceiling reveals the geometry that the exterior skin conceals.

Sunlight streaming through the glazing onto the floor shows how the roof apertures choreograph the climb. The stair is less a circulation element than a slow ascent from the casual ground floor into the curated exhibition level, and it gives the interior a clear spine in a plan that could easily have felt disorienting.

A Crystal in the Courtyard

At the center, where the three wings meet, the exposed structural cage becomes the building's centerpiece: an inverted pyramid of steel lattice and glass suspended over the pale exhibition hall, with an escalator running out of its side. This is the dynamic void the architects describe as showcasing nature and technology together, and the section drawings show hanging plants inside the crystal, turning it into a vertical garden as much as a structural feature.

The courtyard reference is the most debatable claim in the project. A traditional courtyard is open to the sky and organizes daily life around it; this atrium is enclosed, mechanized and spectacular. Still, the diagram comparing the courtyard house to the planted triangular atrium makes the logic legible: the center is where light, planting and movement concentrate, and everything else looks inward toward it. Read as a reinterpretation rather than a revival, it holds up.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan clarifies the trefoil: three pointed wedges with stair cores spiraling around a triangular central opening. The roof plan and gridshell axonometric show how the shell sweeps out in three lobes from a truss-edged center, with folded planes converging on a small skylight. The sections cut through the exhibition halls, the angled glass crystal, bleacher stairs and basement rooms, and one of them traces dashed airflow arrows rising through the crystal toward the viewing deck, suggesting the void also does environmental work.

The sequence of axonometrics, with roof planes rendered transparent and dashed sight lines threading through line-drawn forest, is the most honest explanation of the project. It reveals the building as a set of volumes hung beneath a sheltering roof and aimed outward along deliberate lines of sight, which is exactly what the photographs suggest but cannot fully show.

Why This Project Matters

Pavilions built ahead of new districts usually sell an image of the future and little else. IwamotoScott's design does something more specific: it ties its form to the actual infrastructure and landscape that will shape the district, the airport, the science city and the river park, and it uses a paired tower to claim public ground before development fills in around it. The futurism is in the service of orientation, helping visitors understand where they are in a territory that is changing fast.

The open question is how the building will read once the rural fields give way to the OMA and gmp masterplan. Its fractal skin and hilltop siting were calibrated to rolling hillocks and open views; denser surroundings will test whether the three-way orientation still lands. For now, it offers a useful lesson for anyone designing gateway architecture: aim the building at something real, and give people a reason to stay once they arrive.

Chengdu Pavilion by IwamotoScott Architecture (lead architects Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott), Chengdu, China. Local architect of record: Sichuan Provincial Architectural Design & Research Institute. Area: 3,000 m². Completed 2025. Photography: Courtesy of IwamotoScott.

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