Urban Renewal of Chengdu Pengzhou Longxing Temple Area
Pengzhou, China
Not one building but the renewal of the whole core of Pengzhou's old town, north of Chengdu in Sichuan: a fourteen-hectare site around the thousand-year-old Longxing Temple, designed from 2019 and built by September 2023. The studio rebuilt the district to an old rule of settlement it calls the Ten-side Bush, hills at the back, open ground to the south, forest to the east and water to the west, drawing a watercourse one and a half kilometres long from the Renmin Canal to feed a central pond. The circular roof in this picture is the Curved-water corridor that arcs across that pond, built in large part so Pengzhou's older residents, who live much of the day outdoors, have somewhere to sit and rest above the water.
Under the corridor the Qing-dynasty Longxing Street keeps its original alignment but was dropped three metres and repaved with salvaged local stone, so the old street now runs below the level of the water. Every new roof carries the local grey tile, made a few kilometres away in Guihua Town, and the roofs themselves are public space: a walkway system a kilometre and a half long crosses them, linking five cultural buildings whose curved glass facades lift at their ends like the flying eaves of the temple. In 2025 the project took an Architizer A+ Award as the popular winner of its mixed-use category.
BIAD-ASA Studio
A studio founded in 2015 inside the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, working across urban planning, urban design, architecture and landscape under the English name Archi-Scape Architects. The lead architect on this project was Luoyi Yin, and the website linked here is the parent institute's, since the studio publishes through it.
BIAD-ASA Studio. Photography Arch-Exist (@archexist). Seen via @metastudio__.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.