Lake Dim Sum Project: A Smart Lakeside Pavilion Reviving Guangzhou's Morning Tea Ritual

What happens when a lotus leaf becomes a piece of infrastructure? In Guangzhou's Liwan Lake Park, a proposed pavilion borrows the geometry and hydrology of the lotus to create a rotating umbrella canopy that collects rainwater, shelters diners, and channels water back into the lake. The Lake Dim Sum Project is not just a shelter; it is a machine for sustaining a social ritual, morning dim sum, that the speed of modern urban life has been steadily eroding.

Designed by 启铜 罗 (Qitong Luo), Summer Wang, Yuru Chen, and Cong An, the project was shortlisted in the Urbanscape: Symbiosis competition. Sited in the Xiguan Litchi Bay area, the pavilion responds to a culturally specific condition: aging citizens and families with young children are the park's primary visitors, and they need somewhere to relax, socialize, and dine. Traditional tea houses in the surrounding heritage neighborhoods lack outdoor space and accessibility. The designers propose a lakeside system that brings the communal table outdoors, easing overcrowding while restoring a fading daily rhythm.

A Glowing Platform on Water

Seen at night, the pavilion reads as a luminous disc floating on Liwan Lake, its branching canopy columns rising like stylized trees against the dark water. Illuminated signage and warm lighting turn the structure into a beacon for evening visitors, demonstrating the pavilion's capacity to shift function across the day. What operates as a morning tea service with food stalls and communal seating becomes an observation deck and social gathering point after sunset. The circular platform geometry anchors the design to the lake's edge while keeping visual weight low, preserving sightlines across the water.

Curved Tiers and Translucent Canopies

The physical model reveals the pavilion's layered spatial logic. Curved, tiered platforms wrap around a central column, creating distinct zones for dining, leisure, and scenic viewpoints. Translucent canopies, composed of three rotatable pieces, adjust their configuration in response to rainfall volume and crowd density. This is the core biomimetic move: like a lotus leaf channeling water to its stem, the canopy funnels collected rainwater through a central shaft and distributes it back into the lake, promoting ecological water circulation without mechanical waste.

The model detail of the spiral circulation path shows how gently ramped walkways wind upward around the tree-form column, with figure outlines indicating scale and accessibility. There are no stairs to exclude elderly visitors or families with strollers. Instead, the spiral fosters a sense of progression and discovery, each turn offering a new vantage point of the lake. Glass partitions maintain visual transparency, so the experience of water and landscape remains continuous even as visitors move through enclosed dining areas.

Rooted in Morning Tea Culture

The research board grounds the entire project in lived experience. Archival photographs show crowded tables laden with bamboo steamer baskets, diners packed shoulder to shoulder in traditional tea houses. These images are not decoration; they are evidence of a spatial problem. The intimacy of dim sum culture, its communal tables and shared dishes, requires a particular kind of architecture: open enough to breathe, enclosed enough to feel collective. The designers studied these conditions closely, mapping user demographics and behavioral patterns to arrive at a programme that serves the people who actually use Liwan Lake Park every morning.

Programming Food, Scenery, and Recreation

The programmatic diagram quantifies how the pavilion allocates its space: 45% for food stalls and dining, 30% for scenic enjoyment, and 25% for recreational use. Figures are shown interacting with the landscape at multiple levels, from waterside seating to elevated lookout points. The distribution is deliberate. Food dominates because it is the social engine; scenery and recreation fill the gaps between meals. The modularity of the system allows continuous activation from early morning through late evening, with morning tea booths transitioning into night-time observation areas without physical reconfiguration.

Why This Project Matters

The Lake Dim Sum Project succeeds because it treats a cultural habit as a design brief. Rather than imposing a generic park pavilion onto Liwan Lake, the team of Qitong Luo, Summer Wang, Yuru Chen, and Cong An reverse-engineered the spatial needs of morning dim sum and built outward from there. The rotating canopy is not a formal gesture; it is a functional response to Guangzhou's subtropical rainfall and the practical need to shelter outdoor dining year-round. The rainwater collection loop turns a liability into a resource.

More broadly, the project demonstrates that smart systems in architecture do not have to mean screens and sensors layered onto conventional buildings. Here, intelligence is embedded in the structure itself: a canopy that reads weather and crowd conditions, a circulation path that eliminates barriers, a programme that adapts across the hours of the day. For public parks in rapidly densifying cities, this kind of responsive, culturally grounded design offers a more convincing path forward than either nostalgia or novelty alone.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: 启铜 罗 (Qitong Luo), Summer Wang, Yuru Chen, Cong An

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Project credits: Lake Dim Sum Project by 启铜 罗 (Qitong Luo), Summer Wang, Yuru Chen, Cong An Urbanscape: Symbiosis (uni.xyz).