HDEC AIR-CoLAB Studio Stacks a 23-Meter Lantern Tower Above the Rice Paddies of Ningbo

Somewhere in the flat, grid-scored farmland of Fenghua District, Ningbo, a 23-meter tower punches skyward from the rice paddies like a stalk that refused to stop growing. Designed by HDEC AIR-CoLAB Studio and completed in September 2023, The Lantern in the Paddy Field is a six-story observation tower, café, and visitor center planted at the heart of the "Ten Thousand Mu of Square Fields" project, a national modern agricultural demonstration zone. At 840 square meters, it is modest in footprint but outsized in ambition: a structure that wants to be both a civic gathering point for a rural village and a literal beacon visible across kilometers of flat terrain.

What makes the project worth attention is its refusal to treat rural architecture as either nostalgic pastiche or alien spectacle. The tower's zigzagging stack of triangular floor plates, wrapped in white tensile membranes and steel, borrows its formal logic from the geometry of a mature rice spike. That sounds like the kind of metaphor that collapses the moment you see the building, but here it holds. The form spirals and staggers convincingly, and after dark the membranes glow from within, turning the entire structure into a lantern that broadcasts its presence across the darkened fields. The project earns its name.

A Vertical Pivot in a Horizontal Landscape

From the air, the tower reads as the only vertical element in a relentlessly horizontal world. The rice paddies extend in an almost cartographic grid, punctuated by clusters of village rooftops and threaded with irrigation channels. Dropping a singular tall structure into this context is a bold move, and the designers commit to it fully. The white form contrasts sharply with the greens and browns below, yet its stepped silhouette avoids the monolithic. Each floor plate projects at a different angle, breaking the mass into a stack of overlapping triangular shelves that shift depending on your vantage point.

The site selection is deliberate. Placed centrally within the demonstration zone rather than at its edge, the tower functions as a geographic anchor. It orients visitors within the vast agricultural landscape and gives the surrounding villages a shared landmark. In a region where urbanization has steadily drained young people from the countryside, that kind of place-making carries real weight.

Geometry Borrowed from the Grain

The defining geometric language is the triangle. Each floor plate is a triangular slab that rotates from the one below it, producing the spiraling, stacked form. Corrugated metal balustrades and vertical louvers wrap the edges, giving each level a textured profile while allowing air to pass freely through the structure. Up close, the detailing is crisp: the alternating projections create deep overhangs and sheltered pockets on every floor, so the tower is not just a thing to look at from a distance but a series of distinct spatial experiences as you climb.

Seen from the village, the tower emerges above traditional pitched rooftops without dominating them. Its white surfaces and angular form read as contemporary but not hostile. The scale relationship works because the triangular plates are roughly the size of a village house roof, so the tower registers as a stack of familiar-sized elements rather than a single overwhelming mass.

Inside the Spiral

The interior is more generous than you might expect from the exterior silhouette. The ground floor café features a curved ceiling with linear lighting and full-height glazing that frames the surrounding farmland as a continuous panorama. It is a clever inversion: outside, you look up at the tower; inside, you look out at the fields. The café becomes a room in the landscape rather than a room containing a view.

Ascending through the tower, the staircase is defined by white vertical slat railings and perforated metal ceiling panels that filter daylight from above. An elevator runs through the core, making the summit wheelchair accessible, a detail that matters enormously for a project meant to serve an entire rural community rather than just the able-bodied. The material palette stays restrained throughout: white steel, perforated metal, glass. There is no attempt to introduce warm timber or rough stone for rustic effect, and the building is better for it.

The View from the Top

The rooftop terrace is the payoff. Framed by white vertical louvers that filter wind and frame views, it delivers a 360-degree panorama across the farmland, nearby villages, and distant mountain ranges. Image 7 captures a solitary figure watching the sunset through the louvers, and the composition explains why the tower exists better than any diagram could. The building lifts you just high enough to comprehend the scale of the agricultural landscape, to see the grid of paddies stretching to the horizon, and to understand the terrain as a system rather than a backdrop.

At twilight, the relationship inverts. From the fields looking back at the tower, the white membranes catch interior light and diffuse it outward, transforming the structure into a soft, glowing volume against the darkening sky. The photograph taken through the rice stalks at ground level captures this perfectly: the tower floats above the paddies like a paper lantern, warm and weightless. It is an effect that could easily feel gimmicky, but the proportions and material translucency are calibrated well enough that it registers as atmospheric rather than theatrical.

Steel and Membrane as Rural Material

The structural system is steel frame with diagonal cross-bracing, constructed by Ningbo Tianyuan Steel Structure, with membrane components by Zhejiang Zhongnan Green Construction. Choosing steel and tensile membrane over more conventionally "rural" materials like timber or bamboo is a deliberate position. The architects are not pretending this is a vernacular building. The white membranes give the tower its lantern quality and its visual lightness, while the steel frame allows the cantilevered floor plates to project aggressively without massive columns at their edges.

The membranes also perform environmentally: they provide shade, promote ventilation through the open structure, and reduce solar gain on the interior spaces. In a subtropical climate with hot, humid summers, a permeable envelope that breathes is more practical than a sealed glass box. The overlapping membrane surfaces create a layered skin that shifts in transparency depending on light conditions, giving the tower a different character at every hour of the day.

Plans and Drawings

The section drawing reveals the structural logic clearly. Diagonal cross-bracing runs through the core, stabilizing the stacked triangular plates against lateral loads. Each floor projects in a different direction, and the section shows how the alternating cantilevers create sheltered zones on the floors below. The elevator core is visible running vertically through the center, and the stair wraps around it. What the section also makes legible is the building's porosity: there is as much open air between the floor plates as there is enclosed space, which explains why the tower reads as a stack of platforms rather than a solid volume.

Why This Project Matters

The Lantern in the Paddy Field matters because it takes rural architecture seriously without being sentimental about it. The project does not mimic village typologies or dress itself in reclaimed agricultural materials. Instead, it introduces a genuinely contemporary structure into the countryside and trusts the landscape to hold it. That confidence is justified. The tower works precisely because the paddy fields are so vast and so flat that they can absorb a 23-meter vertical without flinching. The building and the landscape are in proportion.

More practically, the project demonstrates that observation towers and visitor centers in agricultural zones can be more than utilitarian platforms or Instagram follies. By combining a café, accessible circulation, sheltered terraces, and a genuine viewing experience within a formally rigorous structure, HDEC AIR-CoLAB Studio has produced a building that earns repeat visits. The seasonal transformation of the surrounding rice fields, from flooded mirrors in spring to golden carpets at harvest, means the tower offers a different experience every few weeks. That kind of temporal engagement with landscape is rare in architecture, and it is the real achievement here.

The Lantern in the Paddy Field by HDEC AIR-CoLAB Studio. Located in Miaohouzhou Village, Xiwu Street, Fenghua District, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. 840 square meters. Completed 2023. Photography by Yilong Zhao.

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