Zen Architects Terraces Five Chongqing Towers Down a 25-Metre Slope with Water Courts and Planted Balconies

Chongqing has never had flat ground to waste. Its housing either fights the hills or folds into them, and most recent towers do the former: they level a podium, park the cars underneath and let the slope become someone else's problem at the property line. Chongqing Eternal Land, completed in 2026 by Zen Architects, starts from a site where the surrounding roads fall about 25 metres from east to west and 22 metres from north to south. The scheme sits in Guanyinqiao, within the ongoing regeneration of the Dian Ce Cun district, on the residential plots of a larger three-phase masterplan beside the under-construction Mixc Central retail complex.

The numbers are what you would expect from central Chongqing: five high-rise residential towers, two commercial buildings and an underground garage packed into an 18,398 m² site, adding up to roughly 99,800 m² of floor area. What interests us is not the density but how the architects spend the level change. Instead of burying it, they use it to stack commerce below and a residential community above, then stitch the two together with hotel-style lobbies, elevator halls and terraced gardens. The design team calls the concept a "Misty Forest". We read it more simply as a serious attempt to make a tower estate behave like a piece of hillside city.

A Podium That Reads the Slope

From the air the project looks like a familiar Chinese urban block: a tight cluster of towers and a large rounded commercial mass. At street level the story changes. The podium is not a single plinth but a sequence of curving planted terraces, each one stepping with the road so that the base of the building is always meeting the pavement at a usable height.

This is the project's most useful move. In a city where a 25-metre drop across one block is ordinary, the ground floor is a moving target. Zen Architects treats every terrace as a potential front door, which means the commercial edge stays active along the whole perimeter instead of collapsing into blank retaining walls on the low side.

Arrival Borrowed from the Hotel Lobby

The residential entrances are where the developer brief shows most clearly. A broad rounded canopy, carried on slender stone columns and finished with a bronze-toned soffit, shelters a glazed lobby fronted by clipped hedges and a shallow pool. The vocabulary is openly hospitality: the drop-off, the water, the sculpted planting all tell residents they are arriving somewhere curated.

You can be cynical about this, and in many projects we would be. Here the hotel lobby has a real job. It is the hinge between public commerce and private housing, the point where a vertical elevator hall takes you up from the city level to the residential gardens. Making it generous and legible is better than the usual alternative of a security gate tucked behind a car ramp.

Oculi, Columns and Planted Balconies

The detail that carries the "forest" idea is small: round and oval planter balconies cantilevered under circular skylight openings, set between cylindrical stone columns with trees growing alongside. Light drops through the oculus onto the planting, so the covered walkways read less like an undercroft and more like a clearing.

This repeats a theme the architects push all the way up the towers through vertical greening systems. Whether planting at height survives Chongqing's humid summers and a building management budget is a question for the next decade. At ground level, though, the combination of soft curves, stone and daylight does a lot to humanise what is, in plan, a very large scheme.

The Water Courtyard at Dusk

The central courtyard is organised around a dark reflecting pool dotted with round stone seating platforms and threaded by curved paths. The pool is meant to mirror the surrounding skyline, a gesture that suits a city whose identity is tied to its view of itself across rivers and ridges.

The round platforms are the clever part. They turn a decorative water feature into somewhere you can actually sit, cross and gather, which matters if the project's coliving label is to mean anything beyond large shared areas inside individual units. A courtyard that residents use daily does more for community than any amenity schedule.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings explain what the photographs can only hint at. The site section shows tower groups stepping down the slope beside the lower commercial buildings, while the terrace section reveals cantilevered slabs, planted beds and an upper deck built directly into the change in level. The exploded axonometric is the clearest diagram of the whole scheme: lobby, elevator hall and garden layers stacked over a driveway, tied together by vertical circulation shafts.

The hand-coloured landscape sketches and the dusk plan rendering show how much design attention went into the ground plane, testing entrance gardens at different heights and resolving the pool, paths and circular pavilions as one composition.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese housing policy now talks about "fourth-generation housing" and "better homes", phrases that can easily become marketing for balconies with shrubs on them. Eternal Land shows a more grounded version of that ambition. Its real contribution is sectional: it accepts the mountain city's topography as the organising idea and uses it to separate, then reconnect, commercial and residential life without resorting to a sealed podium.

It is still a high-density, high-end development, and its long-term test will be whether the terraces stay public and the vertical greenery stays green. But for a city that will keep building towers on slopes, the lesson is transferable. Design the level change first, and the lobby, the garden and the street edge start to work together rather than against each other.

Chongqing Eternal Land by Zen Architects. Location: Guanyinqiao, Chongqing, China. Site area: 18,398 m²; total floor area: approx. 99,800 m². Completed: 2026. Photography: Arch-Exist, NIE.

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