TROP : terrains and open space Lace a Nine-Metre Shanghai Sunken Garden with White Mesh Stairs

Sunken courtyards in residential towers usually solve a technical problem: they get daylight and air down to basement amenities. They rarely ask anyone to spend time in them. Lacy Steps, the sunken garden at Yanlord Arcadia in Shanghai by landscape architects TROP : terrains and open space, led by Pok Kobkongsanti, starts from a different premise. Its 590 m² void, roughly nine metres deep, links the main lobby, the residential towers and the clubhouse across three levels. It is meant to be a place to stay, as well as a route through.

The move is simple. A run of white-painted metal mesh stairs and platforms zigzags through dense planting, and its permeable skin lets sunlight and rain reach the garden below. What interests us is how much the designers asked of one material. The mesh is enclosure, balustrade, tread and shading screen at once, and it echoes the facades of the towers around it. The result is a circulation space that reads as landscape. It completed in 2024 and won a LILA 2025 Jury Award.

A Nine-Metre Drop Reframed as an Arrival

From above, the stair reads as a single white line folding back on itself through the tree canopy. That folding matters. A straight flight down nine metres would feel like a fire escape. The switchbacks stretch the descent into a sequence of landings, each with a slightly different view into the foliage. Pacing the drop this way turns a vertical problem into a horizontal experience.

Head-on, the structure is more sober. Railings and treads line up with the glazed walls beside them, and the white finish ties the stair to the surrounding architecture rather than setting it apart as an object. The "Garden within Gardens" concept for the wider development asks each space to act as a prelude to the next, and Lacy Steps does that job by putting the residents' first moments inside the garden instead of beside it.

Stairs That Behave Like Rooms

The images that sell the project are the ones with people in them. Children climb beside a planted pond; a resident walks down past palm trunks at eye level. A central platform within the sequence is sized for outdoor reading or small performances and connects to club amenities on the lower ground and basement floors. The Landezine jury singled out this point: the stair platforms work as a social space tying three floors together.

This is the project's strongest argument. Circulation is space a developer already pays for. Making it wide enough, shaded enough and planted enough to linger in costs little extra and returns a lot. Comfortable railing curvature and generous landings are modest decisions, but they decide whether a stair is used or only passed through.

Mesh as a Filter, Not a Wall

Up close, the slatted treads and vertical bars become a screen. Green shows through every gap, and light falls through in thin streaks. The stated aims were to reduce visual bulk, increase transparency and amplify luminosity, and the detail photographs show why mesh fits: it is solid enough to walk on yet open enough that the eye keeps moving past it.

The monochrome white palette does a lot of work here. In a deep courtyard, dark steel would read as a heavy cage. White bounces light down into the void and softens glare on the planting. The risk is maintenance; white metal in a wet, planted courtyard will show every stain. That is a fair trade for the brightness it buys, but one the client will have to keep paying for.

Planting Under the Grid, Through the Seasons

Large round-leaved groundcover and palms crowd right up to the structure, and the stacked, box-like frames cantilever over the beds on slender columns. Keeping supports thin and few leaves soil open and lets rain fall straight through the decks. Choosing the mesh was a planting decision as much as an architectural one: sunlight reaching the garden floor was an explicit driver.

The winter photograph is the honest one. With leafless young trees and bare soil, the white framework is all that remains, and it holds up as a sculptural object on its own. The jury did note the limited room left for vegetation and water, and that is a real constraint. The stair takes up much of the void, so the garden depends on growth over time to read as lush year round.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric makes the environmental logic plain: rain from a cloud and sunlight arrows passing through the mesh into the sunken floor. The masterplan shows how the zigzag decks cross the planted courtyard beside a reflecting pool, setting the stair as a connector between the surrounding buildings rather than as a freestanding feature.

Why This Project Matters

Lacy Steps shows that the leftover spaces in high-density housing, the light wells and service voids that planners treat as engineering, can become the social core of a community. With a reported budget of $50K to $100K, it does this through layout and material choice rather than expensive spectacle. That makes it a model other developers can realistically copy.

It also shows the value of letting one material carry several roles. Instead of layering structure, cladding, railing and shading, the designers chose a single permeable skin and tuned everything else around it. We would like to see more courtyards treated this way: as infrastructure, atmosphere and meeting place in one move, built light enough to let the garden do the rest.

Yanlord Arcadia Sunken Garden, Lacy Steps by TROP : terrains and open space. Location: Shanghai, China. Area: 590 m². Year: 2024. Photography: Chill Shine.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.